Kiss of Hot Sun (17 page)

He thrust the shoe back at me. “At least they match now.”

I was able to run again. Not so well as before. But stumbling, I got along at a fair pace.

The delay had been too long, though. Maybe half a minute—thirty agonising seconds. The gunman had caught up with us.

I felt a swift searing pain in my right calf. The crack of the gun came after.

The bullet ricocheted, whining on its way. But Philip didn’t realise it had struck me first. Though I yelled pretty sharply, he must have put that down to the state of my nerves.

He didn’t waver an instant. Without a word he plunged straight over the edge, taking me with him. For horrible seconds it was like jumping into space without a parachute. Then we hit ground.

I don’t know how I managed to bottle up shouts of pain as Philip dragged me down the terrifying slope that swept all the way to the valley far below us.

The surface was rough, pitted with tricky crevices, strewn with boulders. The scrubby, heathery growth caught at our feet.

I followed Philip’s lead, twisting with him, jumping with him. I gave up wondering if I would fall, abandoning myself to the mad scramble.

We had to go on, because there was terror behind us; a man with a gun. And we had to go on anyway because we couldn’t stop. Our momentum was too great, the slope too steep.

How far it was I don’t know. I was numb with pain and fear and exhaustion long before there came a sudden levelling out. It was only a shelf really, but wide enough to bring our headlong rush to a halt.

I tumbled to the ground, flat out. Sharp thorns needled through the thin cotton of my slacks, but that was nothing to the pain from my injured leg. I hid my face in my hands and fought off the agony. It subsided slowly, the bouncing throbs getting mercifully smaller each time.

Philip still had no idea I’d been hit, and how could I tell him now? I’d been liability enough already. He’d have got away easily by himself. I was just a drag.

The heat was terrible. The ringing sun was king, the warm-soup air cowed into utter stillness.

Standing above me taking stock, Philip grunted. “At least we shall hear him if he tries to come down after us.”

“He won’t need to come down here,” I said tonelessly. “He could just pick us off from where he is.”

“I don’t think so.” Philip shook his head. “There’s a bit of a hump in the ground. You can’t actually see the road from this spot.”

“So what are we going to do?” I hardly cared any more, though. Left to myself, I would just have allowed things to happen to me, because I no longer had the will or the strength to make an effort. Despite the gravity of our position, despite my pain, I knew I could easily have put down my head and slept. I gave an enormous yawn.

Luckily, Philip didn’t notice. “We’d better get moving again,” he said doubtfully. “We’ll try following this ledge around the hillside, and see where it leads us.”

“Okay.”

What did it matter, one way or another? Staying put or pressing on to... where?

Philip reached out a hand to give me a lift up. I bent my right leg and took my weight on it.

The pain nearly knocked me out. Starting at the wound in my calf it seemed to be splitting me open, right through my leg, all the way up the side of my body.

I fell back to the ground with a sharp yelp. I couldn’t help it. I hadn’t wanted Philip to know I’d been hurt, and the damage seemed so slight—scarcely more than a graze. How was it possible for a mere scratch to cause so much trouble?

Now there was no hiding it. Philip had seen that I’d nearly passed out.

“What’s the matter, Kerry?” He crouched down, looking at me anxiously.

I tried to laugh it off. “Sorry to be so silly. My leg’s gone a bit stiff...”

“Let me see.”

It looked so small. A slight tear in my slacks, the frayed edges stained dark with blood. Philip enlarged the tear a bit, enough to see through to the wound.

“That’s nasty. How did it happen?”

I had to tell him. “It could barely have touched me,” I added lightly.

He looked serious. “You’re not going to be able to walk far on that, my girl. And we need some water to clean it up.”

Water! In this desert! The very shape of the word made me long for a drink. I’d not realised how ragingly thirsty I was.

I pushed the tantalising thought towards the fringe of my mind. “I’ll be able to manage,” I told Philip, “once I’m up on my feet.”

He looked dubious, but gave me a hand up. He must have realised there was simply nothing else for it.

We started off with his arm tight around my waist, and me clutching his neck. I did a sort of hop with my bad leg and after a few yards the pain began to ease off slightly.

But only slightly. Obviously it had been a great mistake to rest, even for those few minutes. I should have kept straight on going.

We staggered over the rough ground. Every step was a big effort, every few yards a triumph. We followed the flat ledge in the mountainside for maybe five hundred yards. But then it petered out, lost in the general fall of the terrain.

We’d have to go all that way back! Trek those five hundred yards in reverse and try the opposite direction.

But even this daunting prospect would get us nowhere. “It’s worse still round there,” Philip explained. “That’s why I chose this way.”

So I just stood and waited for him to decide what to do. This time I dared not sit down. I tried to put all my weight on the uninjured leg.

Suddenly Philip exclaimed. “Look! There’s a stream.”

“Where?” I cried excitedly.

He pointed down the hillside. Far below us I caught a glint of silver, like a tiny thread in the drab brownness.

It was a bitter disappointment. The thought of that distant river, water within sight and yet so mockingly out of reach, was almost more than I could bear right then.

“It’s hopeless,” I said in a flat voice. “We’ll never get down there.”

An insidious idea began to grow in my mind. It offered more than a vain hope of water; it offered me a chance to rest. Selfishly, I wanted rest above anything else.

“You go down,” I suggested eagerly. “Then you could bring me...”

I
didn’t get any further. Philip shook his head decisively. “And leave you here alone? What would I fetch water in, anyway?”

He had me there.

Philip was already working out how to get me down that killing slope. “I’ll have to go in a sitting position, feet first. Then if you get behind me with your legs round my waist, you can walk on your hands and do a sort of waddle.” He glanced at me anxiously. “I’m afraid it’ll be grim for you, Kerry. But I just can’t see any other way. I couldn’t possibly carry you, because it’s too steep.”

“I’ll be okay,” I said, trying to sound stoical.

Slowly, laboriously, we made our way down. We must have looked absurd; in other circumstances we would have felt absurd. It took us all of half an hour to reach the bottom. My hands, revolting against such abuse, were raw and bleeding. My clothes were filthy and dark with sweat. I felt a hole gaping in the seat of my blue stretch pants.

I was past caring about trifles. Reaching the water made up for everything. It was no more than a stream, barely three feet across, though the dried up mud on either side showed it could be a massive river in the rainy season.

Sweet and clean, the water tasted delicious. I filled my cupped hands three times over before Philip stopped me.

“Go easy! We must see to that leg now. You can drink all you want in a minute.”

Tenderly, he eased up the slacks so that my calf was exposed. The damage was certainly much more than a graze; I marvelled it had bled so little. The flesh looked ugly, with bluish-black bruising over a wide area.

Philip shook out his handkerchief and dipped it into the stream. At first touch the water was too shockingly cold, but soon the coolness of it soothed the pain. Philip bathed the wound with matter-of-fact thoroughness. He stood up suddenly and ripped off his white shirt. Before I could say a word to stop him, he had started tearing it up into strips.

“But you shouldn’t have...” I protested.

“That leg’s got to be covered,” he said shortly. Then he grinned. “Anyway a white shirt makes us too conspicuous. Come along now—rest it up here, and I’ll bandage it for you.”

I watched his face as he worked, intent upon the job in hand. His fingers deftly twisted the improvised bandage around my leg and fixed it. Then stretching the material of my slacks to the fullest extent, he worked the trouser leg down again.

“There,” he said, patting my ankle gently. “How does that feel?”

“Fine,” I told him. But I was lying. The leg felt a mite better, but it did not feel fine.

Philip had a drink himself then, and afterwards he stayed kneeling, staring down into the flowing water.

“I reckon the best thing is to follow the stream. We’re bound to get somewhere in the end.”

It was surprising how much hope that idea gave me. For the first time since the firing of the shots, I began to think it might really be possible for us to get clear away.

I lifted my head and looked upwards, back at the mountain we had descended so wearily. Now that we had reached the floor of the valley we could see right to the top, past the hump that had obstructed our view from the ledge.

Way up something glinted in the sun. Something bright. It took a few seconds before I guessed what it was—the chromium wheelhubs of the car.

And then, way back along the road, I noticed a tiny black shape. It moved slightly as I watched. A man, walking. A man walking away from us!

I
touched Philip’s arm and whispered just as though I might be overheard. “Look! Up there.”

His eyes took the long focus, searching the wild expanse of mountain. Then he too caught the movement.

“Yes, it must be. Who else would be walking in this heat?”

“He’s moving away, Philip. Does that mean he’s given up?”

“Let’s hope so. I suppose he’s lost track of us. We’d better keep absolutely still until he’s out of sight.”

So we stayed just where we were, not daring to move. The quiet air, quivering with heat, played tricks on us, making the tiny figure on the road above dance uncertainly. Sometimes we thought he’d finally gone and then he would flicker back into existence again, moving with infinite slowness.

At last the distance had swallowed him. Our enemy was out of sight. We could get going.

Or rather, we were free to get going. When I tried to heave myself up, I found that despite Philip’s careful bathing and bandaging, my leg was still in a pretty bad way.

But I wasn’t going to be a burden to him any longer—not if I could help it. I grit my teeth and fought back at the fearful thumps of pain. I swear I didn’t give so much as the smallest gasp as I stood up. I even forced a smile.

I might possibly have got away with it too, if Philip hadn’t anticipated trouble. He was watching me far too closely to miss the obvious signs.

“Pretty rough, is it?” His voice was soft, full of anxious sympathy. “Hold on tight to me, and put as little weight on that leg as you can manage.”

And so we went back to the three-legged routine. A step with my good leg and a sort of hop with the other. Philip matched me, steering me through a maze of boulders that littered the dried-up river bed. Because he had to pay attention to the ground immediately ahead he couldn’t see my face, and that was a blessing.

A soft patch of ground almost toppled me over and I let out an unguarded cry.

Philip halted. “Come on, I’m going to carry you.”

“But... but you can’t. I mean, we don’t know how far...”

“It’ll give you a rest for a bit, anyway. Up with you.”

I was ashamed to be such an encumbrance but Philip just hoisted me up, protests and all, slinging me across his shoulder in a fireman’s lift.

I’d never been a skinny-lizzie. As a boyfriend of mine had once crudely put it, I was a hundred and twenty pounds of solid woman!

Philip carried my weight without a murmur. On such rough ground he couldn’t avoid stumbling, and once or twice I began to slide off his shoulder. He had to stop and hump me up again.

Doubled over, hanging limply, my vision was restricted. An upside-down view of caked river mud, and a close-up of Philip’s dirt-streaked back. I could see the beads of sweat forming, clinging to down-soft hairs before they shook free and hurried away along the brown channel of his spine.

Philip didn’t speak much, barely more than an occasional grunt to ask if I was okay. As for me, I was glad enough to grab at this chance to rest. And anyway, humped over his shoulder, talking was a pretty jerky, breathless business.

Even in this odd and uncomfortable position, the steady jogging motion was curiously soothing. I found myself nodding off, half-way to sleep, in a sort of suspended dream world.

The sudden shade came as a shock. The air was immediately cooler, the savagery of the sun gone. I
struggled to full consciousness. “What’s happened?”

“We’re in a sort of gorge,” Philip panted, “where the river has cut through the rock.”

I twisted my head to look sideways and up. A wall of rock rose high above us. I craned my neck the other way and saw the same thing there.

Philip pushed on for another fifty yards or so, and then stopped. Gently, he began easing me off his shoulder.

“We’ll take a breather.”

The difference in temperature between this shadowed place and the glaring outside world was staggering. We had flopped down beside the stream. I at once slipped off my shoes and dabbled my toes in the flowing water.

“Good idea.” Philip copied me, hitching up his trouser legs and pulling off his shoes and socks.

It was blissful to be sitting here in deliciously cool shade. Harsh reality took some time to return.

Philip was lying back limply. He looked grey with exhaustion. I had to face the fact that, however much he might protest, we couldn’t go on like this. He would pretty near kill himself if he attempted to lug me any further.

I knew what I had to say. I said it quickly, before I could weaken.