cramp themselves against each other perilously in such a way that
both could file. Even so, it took an eternity till the second bar
was cut through. But at last that too was accomplished.
"Now," said Sebastian, shivering. "Now, my friend."
Half the window was blocked by his shoulders--then he was worming out
on his side. Andrew's last view of him was of a pair of shoe-soles
that waggled absurdly for a moment and disappeared. He waited ten
breaths. No sound. Sebastian must be safe in the ditch. He
transferred the iron thing he was clutching to his left hand. It was
cold in his hand. He gulped and started to follow Sebastian.
He slid into the ditch head-first, and lay there on his belly, flat
as a lizard. After his days of confinement the outside world seemed
formidably large and open. He was glad for the walls of the
ditch--even with their protection, he felt as lonely and conspicuous
as a shelled oyster. He listened. All that he could hear was the
distant bubble of water in an irrigation canal and the mutter of wind
in the palms. Now the wind rattled a dry leaf somewhere, like a boy
shaking a fan, and he started. Where was Sebastian? He stretched
out his hand, by inches, and was enormously relieved when at last it
touched a shod heel.
"Sebas--" he started to whisper.
"Ssh," a whisper answered "Sentry." The heel started to writhe away
from him. He followed it, doing his best to make no noise. That had
been the plan, to worm along the ditch till they were on the side of
the prison farthest from the guard-room, opposite the smaller
storehouse. Then they would have to take to the open.
This crawling was a slow, ludicrous business, especially when you had
to carry a bar of iron in one hand. For a moment he was reminded of
a sack-race, and almost giggled aloud. How the devil did Sebastian
get ahead so fast? He could get along faster if he dropped this
silly bar. No, better not.
They were around the corner now. He raised his head, gingerly, and
caught a glimpse of the black bulk of the storehouse. Sebastian had
stopped. A hand came back through the darkness and dug into his
shoulder. Keep quiet, that meant. He lay frozen to the ground.
Suddenly, and without the slightest warning, a grumbling voice spoke
out of invisibility--a voice that seemed not a dozen feet away from
his head.
"Devil fly away with this musket--my arm's gone asleep again!" it
said, in tones of cockney irritation. Something stamped on the
ground.
"Shut your mouth, you misbegotten son of a sweep," said another
voice, low and irate, "Are you a soldier or a nursemaid?"
"I'm a nursemaid," grumbled the first voice--Andrew knew it now--it
belonged to one of the privates who had marched him to prison--the
other voice was the sergeant's. "A bloody private nursemaid to a
couple of stinkin' prisoners what's going to escape and what never
escapes. Why in 'ell can't 'Is Majesty let 'em escape in daylight
wen a man can see to shoot?"
"You let them get through and you'll find out what, soon enough,"
said the other voice, grimly. "Orders are, take alive or dead.
Remember that."
"Just button 'em up in my pocket I suppose," said the first voice in
an unimpressed whine. The other voice seemed to choke for a while.
When it recovered it discussed a question of ancestry with some
vividness.
"Oh, all right, sergeant, all right," commented the first voice,
resignedly. "But a man can't 'elp 'is feelin's. If it was an
eskylade now, I'd be breathin' as easy as a babby. But this 'ole and
corner work ain't work for a soldier. W'y can't 'Is Majesty shoot
the pore buggers 'imself if 'e wants 'em shot? Tell me that, now,"
it concluded triumphantly, "an' I'll stand you a pot o' beer."
"Go ask him," said the sergeant's voice, very bitterly, "Go ask him,
Bowbells. He's in the guardroom now, just waiting for some son of a
whore to ask him a question like that. By God, he'd crucify you."
"Like enough," grunted the other. "Doctor 'e calls 'imself." He
spat. "_I_ wouldn't trust him to poison a sergeant."
"You're a drunk disgrace to the British Army," said the sergeant's
voice with sour finality, "And I'd have you in the calabooze this
minute if--"
"Aye," said the other, thoughtfully, "_If_ I wasn't a pearl o'
marksmen--and if you could draw a cordon round 'ere without me--and
_hif_ I didn't know 'oo buggered the last payroll--Most likely. Run
along, sergeant, and wipe the other boys' noses for 'em. You can
rest easy about this side--there'll be two beautiful corpses to show
'Is Majesty if they tries to run my post."
"You're drunk, you fool," said the sergeant acridly, and departed.
"Wish I was," said the other voice, a trifle plaintively, as Andrew
heard the heavy boots crunch away.
He raised his head cautiously, inch by inch. There was a little bush
at the lip of the ditch--it would hide him as he reconnoitered.
The sentry was just too far away, in the shadowed door of the
storehouse. For all his sleepy arm, he seemed terribly alert and
there were at least thirty yards of open moonlit ground between him
and them. If they rushed him, one of them would be killed or
disabled in the rush and the other would have to kill at once, in his
turn, before the shot brought up the rest of the guard.
It was like Dr. Gentian, this. Very like him. He could see Dr.
Gentian in a cane-chair in the guardroom, waiting composedly for his
birds to fly into the snare.
He sank back into the ditch again. He felt stiff and cramped. Dying
couldn't be much worse. Sebastian had turned around somehow, he
could see his face. He put his own face close. "When you say,
Sebastian," his lips formed, without sound. He saw Sebastian's body
grow taut and his own muscles tightened. Then Sebastian's expression
changed. "Not yet," he whispered. He hunched down and began to
crawl still farther along the ditch.
Andrew followed him without hope. As he crawled, he thought of a rat
he had seen once in a stable. It was an old, sick-looking rat with
grey streaks in its fur and it had been hitching slowly along the
wall, looking for its hole. When it had heard his step it had shown
yellow teeth in a weak snarl and crouched to the floor and he had
realized that its eyes were white and blind. He felt a certain
kinship now for that rat.
They had reached the end of the ditch on that side of the guardhouse.
Sebastian had stopped and was raising himself up a little. Madness.
No, not entirely. The ground fell away sharply beyond this part of
the ditch. If they could take five steps across a swathe of
moonlight they could roll into a shadow. But even as Andrew saw
this, the sentry at the storehouse turned his head slowly toward
them. He ducked his head down again with a little gulp. If a cloud
would only cross the moon! But there seemed to be no real clouds in
all the expanse of heaven--only a few little wisps of silver wool
that would hardly veil the bright face for more than an instant.
Sebastian was fumbling in the bottom of the ditch for something--a
stone. He crouched with the stone in his hand, looking up at the
sky. One of the little wisps was blowing toward the moon like a
drifted feather. Sebastian drew his arm back, waiting. Now the
feather touched the disk, and, for an instant, as Sebastian's stone,
cleanly flung, crashed into the bushes at the sentry's left, the
heart went out of the moonlight.
The next moment they were out of the ditch and huddled together in
the shadow. Andrew, out of the tail of his eye, had somehow caught a
glimpse of the sentry whirling away from them to face the bushes
where the stone had fallen. Now every moment he waited for a cry or
a musket shot, but moment after moment passed, and there was neither
shot nor cry. Luck was with them--so far, they had not been seen.
He wondered where the other sentries were posted.
They crawled along to the edge of their shadow, hugging it fondly.
The slight fall in ground deepened to a little gully that hid them
better--now the storehouse was between them and the first sentry and
they could breathe a trifle easier. They were going in the opposite
direction from the wharves, but that they could not help till they
were sure of having passed beyond the cordon. When it seemed that
they must have done so, they began to circle back, Sebastian leading
the way. He slipped along like an Indian, Andrew tried despairingly
to copy his lightness of foot. At last they were down below the
storehouse and the way ahead seemed clear. Andrew snatched a look at
the sentry through a screen of brush. The man was yawning, eyes
squinted, head thrown back. He had a ridiculous impulse to flip a
pebble at the gaping mouth, and between that and dreading the sound
of his own feet was so absorbed that when Sebastian, creeping ahead
of him, suddenly darted into the door of a deserted and roofless hut
by the side of the wood-path his nerves jerked like plucked
fiddlestrings.
Once inside the hut, he soon knew the reason for their taking cover.
There were footsteps and a mumble of talk coming up toward the hut
from the lower road. "Tricked," said a leaden accent, "Tricked, by
God. A pack of lousy indigo-diggers to trick us so." Andrew
recognized the dull, detested voice with a pang of hate. A lucid
whisper--serene pulse of gold trembling in hollow of crystal
shell--answered the voice and soothed it. "It does not matter,
Charles. We can do without the Mahonese."
"Aye," said Cave. "Aye. We'll have to do without them, now.
But--tricked, by God. I can't get over it, sweetheart. Who'd have
thought they had the guts in them to run away?"
"Charles, Charles, don't think of that now. We are wasting time."
There was a mutter, then the voices sank. Andrew glared cautiously
through a chink in the rotten wall of the hut. It was folly he knew,
but he could not lie there and listen without trying to see. Not ten
steps away, in a patch of moonlight, stood Sparta and Mr. Cave. They
were talking together in soft, tense voices--she had her hand on his
wrist, she was wheedling him as if he were an unruly child.
She was dressed entirely in dark stuffs, a dark handkerchief hid her
hair, the cold chastity of the light gave her features a new beauty,
severe, untainted by color, the sharp beauty of the cutting edge.
Andrew thought of a silver axe in a scabbard of black glass--she had
put away gold for the time and with it the burning gleam of dayspring
and planet--the dark handkerchief capped her head as smoothly and
reticently as a helmet--she looked like the merciless genius of
combat itself, neither man nor woman nor spirit, but something arisen
out of the ground with an arrow in its hand. He could see her
standing in a chariot, Hippolyta, the amazon queen with the maimed
and iron breast, wrapped in the glittering fleece of a golden ram and
urging her cloud-born horses like harnessed gods across the tarnished
bodies of the dead. For an instant, as her face sank into his mind,
it seemed just that it should be so, and he forgot alike that he had
loved her and that she had betrayed him.
She had too much of her father in her to live securely, with an even
heart. Only violence and the brittle lodestone of danger could
release from its cage of sleep, the immortal enemy which lay
enchained in that flesh like an archangel in bonds. Now he saw it
released, a pillar of darkness, and trembled, but not wholly with
fear or hate. The beauty it had was the beauty of the tiger and the
killing frost, but it was beauty, and somewhere at a point beyond the
system of the stars, the unappeasable ecstasy of its pain lay down on
a glittering field and slept between a dove and a hooded eagle. Cave
was a different matter--his darkness was the muddy darkness of a fire
of wet straw--and Andrew felt he could have killed him without the
slightest compunction. But in Sparta, as she was tonight, there was
something that would have turned his hand aside.
Now the two separated, having come to some decision between them that
Andrew was unable to catch, and Sparta glided away toward the rear of
the storehouse. Andrew could only follow her progress vaguely, but
it seemed to him that she left a stir in the darkness behind her as
she passed. Cave remained where he was for some moments, biting his
nails. Andrew gestured to Sebastian, inquiringly--attack him?
Sebastian shook his head violently, jerked a thumb toward the way
that Sparta had gone and made motions of counting a troop of men.
Andrew nodded, his heart thumping. There were others, then--they had
blundered into the hut just in time.
He regarded Mr. Cave's back with sullen distaste--would he never move
away and set them free? Now he turned, his eye fell casually on the
hut, he made as if to come closer but thought better of it. Andrew
felt the muscles of his belly contract, and his fingers clench on the
bar. A mocking-bird whistled from somewhere, and Mr. Cave grew
still. It whistled again and he put his shoulders back and started
to walk toward the sentry, crackling the twigs underfoot deliberately
as he went as if he wanted the sentry to hear.
The sentry heard and stiffened, musket to his shoulder. "Who goes
there?" he challenged softly.
Mr. Cave stopped just on the edge of the open ground. "Overseer
Cave," he said in a flat voice, his bearish shoulders stooped.
"Come out where I can look at you, overseer," said the sentry
briskly, his eye along the barrel.
Mr. Cave approached slowly. "It's all right, Jenkin," he said in a
confidential voice, "I know your orders. They don't apply to me.
I've a message for the Doctor."
"Sorry, overseer," said the sentry, lowering his musket, "Have to
wait till the sergeant makes rounds again. Strict orders--nobody to
pass."
"You can read, I suppose," said Mr. Cave with heavy sarcasm, coming
nearer, "I have a pass. Dr. Gentian's signature."
The sentry shook his head.
"Don't know anything about passes," he said. "Show it to the
sergeant," but he brought his musket down and leaned forward as if to
inspect a paper.
"But I'm in a hurry, I tell you," said Mr. Cave, very near him.
Then, to Andrew's astonishment, the sentry continued to lean forward
till he had passed his center of balance and, with a gasp, was
falling as if he intended to embrace Mr. Cave in his outstretched
arms. Mr. Cave caught him deftly and lowered him to the ground.
"Well done, lass," he said in a whisper to the skirted shadow that
had crept around the other corner of the storehouse and struck the
sentry down from behind. He raised his voice a little. "Come on,
boys," he called softly, and the night was suddenly populous with
catlike shapes. One stooped over the fallen sentry--his hand
glittered with something thin and bright--there was the chuck of a
flat stone striking water on its edge, and a horrible, muffled
coughing.
"Sergeant of the Guard!" came a doleful howl from another quarter of
the compass, "Sergeant of the Guard!" A musket shot clanged on the
moonlight. Then events began to succeed each other far too rapidly
for Andrew to keep track of them.
He was out of the hut, with Sebastian, and running. A man with big
white teeth which glittered like dominoes, rose out of a bush like an
evil fairy and struck at him violently with a long, curved hook. He
felt the iron bar in his hand whirl down and hit something that
smashed like a loaded egg and jarred his wrist. He stumbled and
fell. There was shouting in his ears and a pop-pop-pop of musketry
abruptly silenced. He caught a glimpse of their lugubrious
jailer-corporal jabbing furiously at something behind a tree. Mr.
Cave bellowed a command--an even voice that Andrew knew called orders
in reply. Something that hummed like a wasp snipped a twig from a
bough in front of his face--he jerked and went into an irrigation
ditch with a smacking splash--behind him somebody was screaming "Oh,
Jesus, oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus!" in a high, affronted whine--now
Sebastian was pulling him out of the ditch and they were running
again. Then, abruptly, he was dragged into a dark pocket between two
buildings while a dozen men whose leader carried a truss of blazing
straw on a pole went by at a trot.
"Where are we?" he wheezed, lungs laboring. He discovered, with
surprise, that the iron bar was still in his hand. The other end of
it dripped.
"They've missed us," said Sebastian. "Too busy--up there--" He too
was panting, but furiously busy, ramming home a charge in a musket he
had somehow acquired.
"Where did"--began Andrew, staring at it, dazedly.
"Fool with a cap," panted Sebastian. It seemed sufficient
explanation. "Look," he said, "Fire."
Andrew peeped around the corner of the building. They were still
much nearer the guardhouse than he had supposed. On one hand the
moon lit the scene with precise, bleak radiance, on the other, a
little hut, to the right of the guardhouse, was burning like a spill
of paper with fierce, brief flame.
Mr. Cave and his men had taken such cover as storehouse and trees
afforded. He could see them swarming in the shadows like uneasy
flies. On the lit and open ground between them and the guardhouse
lay a number of broken dolls in attitudes of discomfort. One had on
a red coat and lifted up an arm now, to let it drop again as if it
were too heavy. There were various cries.
Andrew caught his breath. Dr. Gentian could not have more than a
couple of men with him in the guardhouse now. Mr. Cave must have
fifty at least. Yet Mr. Cave and his men had not been able to cross
that little stretch of open, moonlit ground. True, the besieged were
poorly armed and the besiegers had every advantage of shelter, but
even so....
Even as he watched, a dozen men dashed out from cover, their heads
down as if they were running into a rain, and made for the guardhouse
door. They carried a log among them--the intent was evident. A
loophole coughed at them and the leading man stumbled and fell as if
something invisible had struck him across the shins. The charge
wavered--a second man sank slowly to his knees, like a tired
horse--the others broke, dropping the log--one of them was wringing
his hand and putting it to his mouth, like a boy with burnt fingers.
Mr. Cave was cursing.
Something tugged at Andrew's sleeve. "Give me one of your buttons,"
said Sebastian's voice in his ear, fierce and hurried. "They are
silver, aren't they--I must have silver, too--no, a little one--"
Andrew wrenched one of the tarnished buttons loose from his coat and
saw, uncomprehendingly, Sebastian take it, drop it into the narrow,
black well of the musket-barrel, ram it down. Then Sebastian was
crouching on one knee, muttering to himself, musket poised.
Mr. Cave was roaring in the trees like a bull, trying to lift his men
across that patch of open ground. But they would not be lifted, they
stuck where they were. There was a weight on their limbs, the
invisible weight of a name, it pressed them to the earth. The beasts
had turned on the beast-tamer, but they were still afraid of his whip.
Andrew caught a second's glimpse of Mr. Cave, as he darted from one
shadow to another, raging. Sebastian cursed softly--the glimpse had
been too short for him to fire. Now they heard a shrill, frightened
squealing, and the thud of boots kicking flesh. Mr. Cave encouraging
his followers. Then again, for an instant, he was in clear view,
recklessly exposed against the glare of the burning hut. His hands
were cupped to his mouth, he was calling aloud.
"Come out, you damned old wizard!" he roared, in a furious, weeping
voice, "Come out and surrender--your life if you'll surrender!--if
you don't, I by God, we'll roast you there in your shell!"
A flash answered from a window and Mr. Cave's broad hat spun from his
head as if a gust of wind had tweaked it. Dr. Gentian's clear, sharp
voice called back something in Italian, threat or promise, and Andrew
could see the besiegers stir uneasily in the darkness. Then four
things happened, almost in the same, instant.
A man with a bloody face and a naked scythe in his hand burst out of
a clump of darkness, followed by a score of others, and fell upon the
flank of Mr. Cave's forces. The clear, sharp voice cried out to them
like a joyous cock. Mr. Cave, his body convulsed, leapt to rally his
men--and the musket in Sebastian's hands exploded.
It was a long shot, and at first Andrew thought that it had missed.
Then he saw Mr. Cave hitch, queerly, in his stride, get on again, and
then collapse slowly into the ground, as if quicksand had taken him.
A form that must have been Sparta's, for it had streaming hair, ran
out of an eddy of conflict and fell upon the body like a dog on a
grave.
"The wharves!" called the clear, sharp voice, weaker now, but still
very joyous. "Head them off from the wharves, you Greeks--they're
making for the wharves!"
They were running again. There was clamor and a flare behind them,
where men hunted other men in the moon-splashed darkness like
terriers chasing rats in a moonlit barn. Sebastian was ahead of
him--behind there were many, but the beaten Italians were throwing
their weapons away and calling "Surrender--Surrender--" in high,
shrill voices. Andrew threw a glance over his shoulder, and saw, in
a nightmare flicker, a fellow twenty yards behind him stare stupidly
at a point of steel that stuck abruptly out of his breast and fall,
tripping the man who had run him through the back. Then the ground
under Andrew's feet rang hollow suddenly--the wharf. He slipped on
greasy wood--was down on his knees--up again. "Here" called
Caterina's voice--he caught at a hand--leapt--sprawled into the
bottom of a rocking boat.
There was an oar somewhere--he grabbed at it and began to splash with
it furiously. They were moving away from the wharf now, but the damn
sail wouldn't catch the wind. _Row_! The boat seemed to stick in
the water like a bug in a stream of molasses but the gap between it
and the wharf was widening--just in time, for there was shouting
behind them now. He stole a glance back. There was the man with the
bloody face. His left arm dangled at his side like a broken stick.
He was yelling something and pointing. There was a ragged spatter of
sound--something jumped under Andrew's oar like a frog taking
water--he heard a gasp from the bow of the boat. "Hit, Caterina?" he
called, but "No, no," said a voice.
Then the sail filled at last, and the wind and the current took them.
The man with the bloody face was shouting and dancing up and down,
but his voice was fainter. They swept around a curve, he was blotted
out. There was nothing left of New Sparta but a confused,
diminishing uproar and a dying redness in the sky.
He stopped splashing with his oar and put it down. The boat must be
the little pleasure-boat which he and Sparta had used in their
expeditions for turtle, Andrew noticed now. He wondered how
seaworthy it would be when they got outside the bay.
Another thought struck him. Carlos, the boy, who was to have been
with them.
"What happened to Carlos?" he said.
"At the last moment, he was afraid," said Caterina, calmly. "So he
went with them."
"With who?"
"With the other Minorcans. They heard they were to be killed
tonight, so they went away."
"Went away! In God's name, how could they go away?"
"The soldiers were busy. Mr. Cave had been to them and told them to
revolt, but they did not trust him. So the old people met and
decided. They told Mr. Cave they would be ready tonight, but as soon
as it was night, they tied up their overseers and began to go away,
one by one. A few were left, to deceive. The Italians did not stop
them, they thought it was part of the plan. When they found out, it
was too late. Mr. Cave had to choose between running after them and
fighting Dr. Gentian."
Andrew gasped. So that explained Mr. Cave's grumbling. "Tricked, by
God!"
If Dr. Gentian had been watchful or Mr. Cave loyal, so appallingly
obvious a plan could never have succeeded--but the Doctor's
watchfulness had been employed solely upon Andrew and Sebastian and
Mr. Cave's treachery had wrecked his own scheme. Add to this the
firm belief in the animal stupidity of the Minorcans which both Cave
and his master held as a tenet of faith, and the thing was done.
After years of rule, men grew careless, forgetting the ruled can have
any craft. If Mr. Cave had won, he would doubtless have blamed the
slaughter of Dr. Gentian on the departed Minorcans and, with Sparta's
word to back him, could have looted the plantation as he pleased.
Andrew pondered these circumstances in his mind.