Darkness Be My Friend (13 page)

We pushed the horses away and went on. We walked quite a distance, ten steps at a time, and I at last started to allow myself the first faint glimmer of hope. Maybe they had given up. Maybe they didn't have enough people to cover the whole area, and we'd walked right through their patrol line. Maybe...

Then I saw Homer, frozen just like Fi an hour earlier.

Again I stopped, trembling, sick with rage and fear. We couldn't keep getting away with this. Either this time or the next time or the time after, our luck would run out. I'd learned that, after our attack on Cobbler's Bay. Would this be the time we were caught or killed? Did it really matter which time it was, if it was going to happen anyway? And of course it was.

I didn't see the patrol Homer had heard, but after ten minutes he slowly and silently began to withdraw. The three of us withdrew with him.

We met back in the middle of the grassy plateau. It seemed to be the only safe place. We huddled together and again talked in the faintest whispers. Three of us talked, anyway. Fi just wept, silently. The awful relentless pressure had got to her.

The only one sure of anything was Homer, and he was only sure of one thing. He was insistent.

"We've got to get out of here," he said. "We must get out tonight. We absolutely can't be here in the morning. Or it's the end of us."

That was no great help. He was right, but he still didn't have an answer. We stood in our silent miserable huddle, not a single idea in our minds. Behind us stood the horses, in their own huddle. They didn't look too happy either. Maybe they were hurt at the way we were ignoring them.

As I recall, Kevin and I thought of it simultaneously.

"The horses," I said.

"Those bloody horses!" Kevin exclaimed suddenly.

Homer realised immediately. Fi looked puzzled, but she was still crying her silent tears and maybe finding it hard to concentrate.

"The horses?" she asked, her mouth twisting with her distress. I saw the white line of her scar.

"We ride the horses out of here," Homer whispered. "That's what you mean, isn't it?"

"At full gallop," I confirmed.

My heart was pounding with excitement and hope—and my old enemy, fear. It was an outrageous idea, wild, crazy, and maybe impossible—but we had no other ideas, no other way of escape.

And yet ... There were so many problems, so many dangers. Riding at full gallop, on unknown horses, through darkness, through bush, through gunfire. One branch in our faces and we'd be lucky to escape with multiple fractures to the face and skull. One hoof in a rabbit hole and we'd fly straight into the nearest tree trunk, or land at the feet of a soldier who, in my imagination, was already raising his rifle. One tree in the wrong place and the horse would smash into it at fifty k's an hour and both he and I would be as dead as if we'd hit a concrete wall on a motorbike. No helmets, no reins, no saddle. If he shied or refused or bucked, or stopped at the sight of a soldier or the sound of gunfire...

"Let's do it," I said, but hating the sound of the sob in my voice.

There was one consolation. Fi, who knew as much about farm life as she did about the history of Venetian blinds, was a great rider. She'd had lessons from Daphne Morrisett, and Daphne was the pride and joy of Wirrawee, having ridden in the Olympics three-day event. Not many of us could afford Daphne as a teacher but Fi's parents were heavily into stuff like tennis
lessons, piano lessons, riding lessons. Fi turned out to be a good natural rider who won lots of ribbons at pony club. Daphne said she reminded her of herself at the same age, which was high praise.

So although the danger was terrible and real for all of us, it was perhaps a little less so for Fi. We could just worry about ourselves. We didn't have to spend a lot of energy worrying about Fi, who seemed to be falling apart quickly.

The horses nodded and danced as wc came to them. It's just the way horses arc. It's one of the things I've always liked about them. Their soft noses prodded and poked at our pockets. Soft, with surprising strength and hardness behind them. I was reminded again of their power.

But not powerful enough to stop a bullet.

We each chose one. Mine was a chestnut, a gelding, a bit overweight, like they all were. I let him sniff my hands for a while, giving him a chance to get used to me. I rubbed his nose and neck, then ran my hand down his flank. I could feel the tension, his quivering muscles. These were stock horses, used to work, to tricky jobs and hectic riding. The chestnut had picked up my mood and was getting charged up already.

I thought I'd better get on, and try to settle him. Homer held him at the neck while Fi helped me to mount. It was difficult without stirrups. But it was fair enough for me to go first for once because I was the shortest of the four of us and probably the weakest rider. I slithered up over his neck and got myself balanced. The horse trembled, and tried to shake his head. I don't think he'd been ridden for a long time.

"They always get excited when you get on bareback," Fi said.'

Sure enough as soon as Homer and Fi let him go he moved away quickly. He kept moving sideways until I could persuade him to stop by swearing in his ear and kicking him hard. Kevin mounted the same way I did, with the help of Fi and Homer. He wasn't very graceful about it, though. For a minute he was lying across the back of the horse, trying to get himself up and facing the right way. He was on a brown gelding which went for an angry little canter with Homer still holding on to the horse's head. But when Kevin did get up and Homer let go, the horse seemed to settle down.

I was worried about the noise we were making, but what could we do?

Nothing.

Fi got Homer onto a big black mare, who immediately took him for a quick trot around the clearing. The horses were getting really excited now. That was good and bad for us. We needed them to charge at full speed but we didn't want to be thrown. Fi was the last to mount and I thought with no one to help her she'd have trouble, but she just kept talking to the horse. He was tossing his head and prancing but he seemed to be listening. She led him over to a tree stump and stepped onto it, still whispering to him. Then, with a quick easy spring, she vaulted across his back and sat easily and lightly. It was sickening.

So there we were, ready for our first, and perhaps our last, ride together. Something flashed into my mind about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Who the hell were they? I had no idea, but it seemed that
maybe that's what we were: four riders galloping into an apocalypse.

With the horses barely under control we tried to choose a direction to go. The one we chose was the worst in some ways: towards Wirrawee. But again, as so often in this war, we had little choice. Behind us, towards the Shannons' place, was no good because it was downhill, and that was just too dangerous at speed and at night. To our left and right the bush was too thick. We didn't want to go riding straight into town but we were still about two and a half k's away, so we should be able to get off the horses before we found ourselves in Barker Street stopping for a red light.

Of course, we wanted to get to Wirrawee. It was just a question of how and when we got there.

Anyway, that was the least of our worries. Getting through the cordon of patrols, those armed and deadly soldiers: that was all we could think about. There was nothing else worth worrying about compared to that.

The sinking feeling in my stomach told me it was time to go. We turned our horses' heads as best we could and faced the clearer part of the plateau. I gave Fi a nervous grin but she was too busy lining her horse up, and too far away to see my expression anyway. I tried to calculate how long we'd have before we were on top of the soldiers: probably about a minute and a half; two minutes at the outside. It depended on how fast the horses were, how much their months of good grass and little exercise had slowed them down, how reluctant they would be to gallop at night through bush ... and on the other hand how churned up they were getting, how springy and stoked they were. It was vital that we
built up enough speed to hit the patrols at maximum revs. And then, of course, would come the big test: how the horses would react if they were fired at. I had a vague idea that police horses were put through training drills, where people burst paper bags near their heads to get them used to shocks and loud noises. Our horses gave the impression that they would go berserk if a gun went off anywhere near them.

Homer looked around at us. I heard his whispered question: "Ready?"

I nodded and croaked yes, my mouth and throat suddenly so dry that my tongue seemed to swell and fill my whole mouth. I didn't look at the others but I guessed they must have said yes too, because Homer turned and gave his horse a belt', and we were off.

It was unbelievable: the strangest feeling of my life, terrifying, and in some wild way the most exhilarating as well. My horse twisted sideways just as we started—I don't think he liked what was happening—and by the time I pulled him round and got him straight again the others were five lengths in front. And they were accelerating fast, too. The horses got the idea really quickly. Maybe they'd been longing for a good hit-out. Whatever, I was astonished at the way they started moving. Within a few seconds we were rushing through the night, the sweat already cooling on my face, the big rumps of the other horses in front of me, their tails flying, their three riders crouched low on their backs, heads down, holding on, like me, for dear life. It was absolutely the eeriest thing, and one of the eeriest things about it was the silence. Apart from the quick
thudding of the hoofs and the hot breathing of the horses there was not another sound.

For the first couple of hundred metres we were in clear country. Our biggest danger there was rabbit holes. I eased my horse a little to the right as I started to make up the lost ground. Coming up fast was the sight I didn't want to see but knew I would, sooner or later. It was the dark, dark patch of bush, all shadows. I felt we were lemmings, racing to the edge of the cliff. There was no cliff—I hoped—but there were death and destruction waiting for us. We were fools to think we could gallop at full speed into that, in pitch blackness, and hope to survive. This was suicide.

And suddenly it was on us. I took a deep breath as we plunged in. It was like a ride I'd been on once at Wild World, called the Super Chiller. I'd taken a deep breath on that too. We'd been at the top of a vertical drop and the little cage we were in seemed certain to drop straight to the ground, smashing into a million pieces.

In this bush I expected we would crash into a thicket of trees and rocks and bushes and be smashed into a million pieces.

The horses tossed their heads wildly, but they didn't slow down. Horses can be pretty mad sometimes. I remember when we had the Southern Region Cross-Country Titles, and Wirrawee High School hosted them. I wasn't running but I volunteered to be an official, just so I could get out of school. I was stationed at a gate on the Murdochs' property to make sure the runners didn't miss the turn-off. Near the Murdochs' house were their stockyards and they had a young colt in there that
they'd just bought. As more and more runners went past, the horse got more and more excited. He started galloping up and down in the yards, faster and faster, getting wilder and wilder. Soon he was galloping full pelt at the fence and stopping just in time. He was so worked up that 1 got worried about him. I ran up to the house to tell the Murdochs but, when I was still fifty metres away from the gate, the colt ran into the fence at full speed. I guess he just forgot to stop. He was dead by the time I got there. Broken neck. I'll never forget it. He was a beautiful horse. Old Tammie Murdoch was devastated. She never let runners go through her property again, although it wasn't their fault, of course.

Anyway, the horse I was on didn't slow down either. He went at it full speed. The ride stopped being exhilarating and became completely and utterly terrifying. I flattened myself along his neck but at the same time tried to keep my forehead up so I could get a bit of a look at what we were going to hit. I wanted to see it before I was splattered against it. There was plenty of noise now. To my left I could hear nothing but crashing and smashing as the other three thundered through the scrub. It sounded like not one of them had slowed down. I squealed as a low branch whipped over me, missing by a centimetre. At the same time the horse swerved wildly and I nearly came off. As the trunk of a sapling brushed my foot, I was glad then that he had swerved.

I glanced ahead again and this time screamed out loud. I felt so helpless. I was sure I was going to die. There was a mess of gum trees only a few metres away in front, medium growth stuff, no gap that I could see
in the darkness. There was nothing to do but put my head down, bury it in the horse's mane and wait for the crash.

There was a crash, too. A low branch, solid and hard, thumped me across the back of my shoulders, then again on the bum. I've never been hit so hard in my life.

I clung on. The horse was blowing and steaming. Branches were thrashing against me. But I actually gave the horse a kick in the ribs to keep him going. I knew we couldn't stop. The pain in my body was terrible, like I'd been bashed on the back by a telegraph pole, but I knew the pain of a bullet would be worse. Then I was whipped by leaves and light branches. We were racing through another, thinner, clump of trees. I felt like my hair was being ripped from my scalp. I wanted to chicken out now and tell the horse to stop, but I realised he was beyond that. He was bolting and he wouldn't stop until he fell over. I was gasping with pain and shock and fear. I couldn't hear the others any more. I had no idea what was happening to them.

Then things changed again. I felt it, not so much from the fact that the leaves stopped flogging me, but because the air felt different. It was cooler. There was more of it. I dared to glance up again. To my left I thought I heard Homer or Kevin call out something. But I didn't need that. In the better light out here, in this clearer area, I could see exactly what they had seen.