Crispin's Army

The building of the cairn took longer than Crispin had expected, and the day was well advanced by the time it was done. It was, however, finely constructed and would survive the battering of the elements for many years to come, he judged, during which time it would serve as a memorial to the events that had taken place on that spot, a place where travellers might, if not stopping for the night, at least pause for rest and reflection.

Crispin and his companions sat down when the work was done to take a rest and smile with amusement at their newly shorn appearance. Tana produced a mirror, and it was passed around so that each could examine his or her reflection. All of them had let their hair grow since departing from the city. When Crispin had sensed the need to place the grain sack dummies in the shelter, it had occurred to him to add the hair to make them more realistic, and Josie had gone to work with the shears, slicing off sheaves of hair, and, for good measure, trimming the men’s beards. Finally, Tana had cut Josie’s hair. It all lay in a strange heap in front of them now: Crispin’s red, Tana’s raven dark, Charlie’s almost as dark, Simone’s chestnut curls, Mina’s mid brown, Josie’s light brown, Gus’s brown-but-greying, Nick’s fair and Ralph’s dark brown hair.

Sitting in their midst, Elizabeth was now conspicuous among them with her salt and pepper coloured locks trailing over her shoulders. Self consciously she gathered them into a bun on the back of her head.

“I’ve been letting myself go lately,” she remarked to no one in particular. “It’s hard to keep yourself looking decent at such a remove from civilisation.” The remark had not been intended as a slight to the others, but it was generally received as such.

“I’m sorry you had to do it,” Crispin said to the others.

“It’s okay, Crispin,” said Mina quietly. “It was becoming a sod to comb out every day, anyway.”

They sat staring as the wind whipped the strange pile in front of them, mingling the colours and whisking away the occasional loose strand. They gazed fixedly, as if by concentrating on the trivial loss of their hair, they could blot out consideration of the enormous loss of life represented by the cairn looming behind them.

Cath took Gus on one side to change the cloth dressing on his leg and inspect the wound, muttering unhappily, as she did habitually, about the complete lack of sterile dressings and apparatus. She had observed that country people seemed to survive minor wounds better than city people, who had been brought up in a relatively infection free environment. She had heard during her time in Vale of several cases where a city-dweller had succumbed to septicaemia while a villager suffering a similar injury had made a full recovery. But she reassured herself that Gus was relatively healthy, and that the risk of infection was less up here in the mountains.

There was no point, Crispin had realised, in pressing on, so makeshift shelters were arranged among the rocks, and the travellers rested for the rest of the day and the following night. During the night, Crispin, Simone, Gus and Tana each took a two hour shift at watching Elizabeth, who slept like a baby throughout.

In the morning, there was a sad moment as the realisation was made that at this point the army would have to part company with its horses. A party detailed to build a permanent shelter on the site retained a few animals to drag timber up from the woods below. The remainder were stripped of their tack and sent packing with a slap on the rump, and they galloped off down the slopes to revel in their new-found freedom.

As the last whinnying faded on the crisp, still mountain air, Crispin shouldered his pack, and the army was on the move again, this time foot soldiers all. Their breath steaming, they trudged up through the snow, stopping frequently to catch their breath.

At one of these pauses Crispin turned to Josie, struggling up in his footprints. “I must be getting old,” he gasped. “I don’t recall it being such hard work the last time.”

“You didn’t have such a load on your back the last time, did you?” Josie wheezed.

Crispin was carrying the rocket powered line and a zapper, as well as his regular pack. “Not going this way, no,” he admitted. “But we were well laden coming back, weren’t we?”

“We were,” Josie agreed, “but we also had the adrenalin pumping, which does wonders for your athletic ability. It’s great what you find you can do when you know there’s someone coming after you with a gun.”

“That’s true,” said Crispin. He made a move to resume climbing.

Josie put a restraining hand on his arm. “Not so fast,” she panted softly. “Some of these people will start feeling the effects of anoxia soon.”

“The effects of what?”

“Anoxia,” said Cath, drawing up close behind Josie. “Mountain sickness, if you like. Look. Some of them are already looking nauseous in the rarified air.”

Crispin looked back down the line behind her, and could see pale faces, mouths hanging open, sucking in the air, while here and there other people were standing bent double, friends hovering over them anxiously.

“I get the message,” said Crispin. He put his pack down in the snow and sat on it. Josie suspected he was relieved to have an excuse to take a longer rest himself.

They spent the night huddled close together in the rocky gully where Crispin had found the chimney on his previous trip. Everyone put what padding they could beneath themselves, settled into whatever niches they could find among the rubble, and wrapped themselves warmly in blankets, coats, animal skins and whatever else came readily to hand to keep out the merciless cold. In spite of the sheer cliff face that rose at their backs, they were all keenly aware of the icy wind blowing off the snow-encrusted peaks above, and for many sleep was a long time coming.

Crispin sat awkwardly, his back and buttocks aching, wishing he could find some position that gave a little comfort, but finding none. He was cradling Josie’s head in his lap, and she in turn was holding Karl, enveloped in blankets so that just sufficient of his face was showing to enable him to breathe.

At his feet were Tana and Cath, with Frances somewhere between them, shielded from the cold by the warmth of their bodies.

Both children, Crispin noted, seemed to be bearing up well despite the rigours of the journey, and even the trauma of the battle did not appear to have had any lasting effect. Children, he mused, seemed to have more resilience than their elders.

In the early morning, Josie shook him awake. He became instantly aware of a mournful sound, a keening like a wailing wind. But it was not the wind. It was the sound of human grief.

Crispin threw off the swaddling blankets and the layer of powdery snow that had fallen on top of them. He brushed snow from his hair, and as he stood up, his body shook with the cold. He began picking his way in the dim light over a rocky terrain transformed by the dusting of white upon it into a landscape of sharp contrasts. Not far off, a huddle of people could be seen, shoulders bent, hands thrust into pockets or the folds of heavy robes, seemingly oblivious to the dusting of snow that lay on them like lint. Josie followed close behind Crispin, clutching Karl to her and cursing quietly as she stumbled on loose rocks.

In the midst of the group, a man and a woman sat cross legged, the woman cradling a baby in her lap and rocking gently backwards and forwards. She was hunched over the baby, but her moaning carried in the stillness, becoming faintly unearthly as it echoed round the barren gully.

As Crispin’s boots crunched on the rock at her side, she looked up, tears streaming from glacial grey eyes down over pallid cheeks. He did not need to be told that the baby was dead.

The baby’s father looked up, lank black hair and a jutting square jaw shaded with stubble providing a sombre frame for cold, accusing eyes that said, “You did this.”

“I made no promises,” said Crispin, answering an unspoken challenge.

He walked away and sat on a rough prominence to one side of the valley, a considerable remove from the mourning parents, but still well within earshot of the mother’s moans.

Josie walked over to where Tana, Cath and Frances were lying, and placed Karl in their care. She then walked down the gully to where Crispin was sitting and climbed up. Perched on the rock behind him, squatting with his shoulders between her knees, she began kneading his neck muscles.

For a long time he sat in silence, his hands planted rigidly on his knees, letting the emotions ferment inside him while the sky grew paler before his eyes.

“This is silly,” he breathed at last. “I feel worse, far worse, about one baby than I did about all those who died in the fighting.”

“The death of a baby is always a tragedy,” said Josie earnestly. “It has no say in whether it lives or dies. Its fate is totally in the hands of others. Its parents knew the risks of coming on this trip. No one forced them to come.”

Crispin sat in silence again, weighing the truth of Josie’s words against his own feelings of guilt for all that had happened. He sensed his own powerlessness. Since the first intrusion into his world by the helicopter, he had been swept along by events and emotions too great for him to control. He sighed.

Quietly, Josie began to sing. She sang not a city song but a ballad she had heard in Vale, singing with lilting sweetness of a farm boy’s love. Crispin was amazed, not merely as he had not heard her sing for many months, and was delighted anew by her voice, but because she had chosen a village song, and had learned it almost perfectly.

Her singing lifted his heart as it had done so often in the past. He raised his hands to where hers were still working on his shoulders, gently took them in his own, and pulled her down till her face was level with his. As she sang, he pressed his lips against her cold cheek, coaxing life into her frozen flesh. She finished the song, and he kissed her lips in gratitude.

“Thank you,” he murmured. “Where would I be without you?”

“Probably at home by the fire,” Josie answered, “instead of out here freezing to death and risking your neck at every turn.” She rose, a little painfully, out of her position, and slapped him on the back. “Come on,” she grinned. “Let’s go and get some breakfast.”

After breakfast - a meagre affair of oatcakes and herb tea - Crispin and Charlie prepared themselves for the next stage of the journey. Standing back a little from the base of the cliff, some fifty metres apart, they aimed their rocket-powered grapples upward, nodded to each other, and fired.

The rockets soared upwards, trailing behind them climbing ropes. The trajectory carried them over the top of the cliff, and the two men watched anxiously to see if the grapples would hold or fall back. The crowd of spectators cheered as they held fast.

Crispin and Charlie each fastened the end of a long rope ladder to his belt, then secured themselves to the line and began to climb the cliff face. Handholds and footholds proved not to be plentiful, and the two men were glad of the added assistance of the rope. Charlie glanced down, and was relieved to see that the crowds gathered at the base of each rope had spread a tent sheet between them in case either man should fall.

Pausing for breath during the course of his climb, Crispin examined the rock surfaces close before him. The crag to which he was clinging was of lichen-veiled granite that had long ago risen from deep in the earth. It was rosy with garnet, and studded with xenoliths, pieces of some other rock that had become caught up in the glutinous currents of the still-molten granite just as he had been drawn into the ponderous vortices of Urbis. And just as the xenoliths had been absorbed, grey islands in a mica sea, so had he been absorbed.

The thirty metre cliff seemed to go on for ever, and by the time Crispin pulled himself up onto solid ground at the top, he was gasping, gulping in the thin air, and felt himself to be soaked in his own sweat. He secured the rope ladder temporarily and trotted over to where Charlie was struggling up the last few metres of cliff.

As Crispin arrived above him, Charlie’s foot slipped from its hold, and the crowd gasped as he floundered momentarily, clutching the rope for dear life until he found a new foothold. Crispin dropped to his knees and reached down to pull him up.

“Are you all right?” he said, fearful for his comrade.

“I think so,” Charlie gasped breathlessly.

He worked his way upwards, until Crispin was able to help him over the edge. While Charlie stood panting, Crispin released the ladder from his belt and secured it with a stake driven into packed snow with a boot heel as he had done with his own ladder.

When the two men had rested, they drew steel spikes from their belts, and proceeded to secure the rope ladders more permanently. When they had assured themselves of the safety of the ladders, testing them with their own weight, they gave the signal for others to start climbing, warning that only one person was to be on the ladder at any time.

Arne and Nold were the first two men to come up the ladders, their long hair lank and wet and their beards stiff with frost. Each brought a rope and a block and tackle mounted on a simple tripod, and these were used to raise bags and bundles of equipment and sacks and pots of food.

Gus, Simone, Mina, Elizabeth and two further men then came up, each carrying in a bundle another rolled up ladder, each of which was secured along the top of the cliff. Tana and Josie climbed up, each carrying her child on her back, and then every other member of Crispin’s army made the ascent.