White Eagles Over Serbia (11 page)

His objective was a series of fairly large caves in the opposite bank of the river where it entered a ravine of red and yellow conglomerate. Here he had sheltered once from the rain, and here he hoped to find a ready-made headquarters where he might dump his equipment before embarking on a methodical exploration of the range of hills. Accordingly he left the trees and waded across the water at a ford, and struck a narrow overgrown path which led him gradually upwards into the thick scrub which choked the entrance to the gorge.

There were, as far as he could see, no other fishermen about and this was surprising for it was at this point that the Studenitsa river became really fishable. Two great prongs of stone bounded the water, and here for a good way the river itself seemed all but choked by a solid floor of branches which had been washed down from the mountains above, and which had been covered by a dense carpet of green moss. Here too were huge boulders against which the water raised itself in dark pools, thrown up to right and left of its course. Peering down into the inky recesses of these pools Methuen discerned the large shadows of fishes, lounging among the shadows. But he must not indulge himself in this way, he kept telling himself, as he followed the path along the precipitous sides of the ravine; at one point, from a turn in the track, a corner of the orchard where the monk had been fishing came into view. Methuen glanced back and saw the figure still sitting there, motionless.

He turned and was about to address himself to the path when something about the immobility of the distant figure struck him, some preternatural stillness in the pose which had not altered by a hairbreadth this last hour. Overcome by a sudden impulse he threw his pack behind a bush and turned back on his tracks, running with long strides in his heavy boots down the hill, the scrub snatching at his ankles from either side. He emerged once more behind the hillock, and once more stalked the motionless fisherman.

From the shade of a clump of thick bushes he threw a heavy stone into the stream beside him, disappearing from sight as he did so. The stone crashed into the water startling the fish but the figure of the lone fisherman did not move, and seeing this Methuen cocked his pistol in the shoulder-sling and raced down the slope to the water's edge. He came up beside the figure and knelt down to stare into the dead face with a gradually dawning horror which seemed to communicate itself now to the whole of that silent landscape in which they found themselves, the living man and the dead one.

There was a trickle of blood at his mouth and through the rents of the tattered surplice Methuen could see the cause—the slash of bullet-wounds. He had been shot from directly opposite where the pinewoods came down to the river forming a thick patch of cover. Perhaps he had been asleep, for the body was leaning back against the tree; at all events the sudden death which had come upon him had not disturbed the contemplative serenity of his pose. His rod was propped over a stone and the willow passed beneath his legs as he sat. Round his neck there was a placard on which had been written in clumsy letters: “Traitor”. He had, in fact, been nailed to this tree by bullets for all the world like the body of a jay is nailed to a bam door, as a warning. It was presumed that the passer-by would know to whom he had been a traitor, and who had extracted this extreme price for his treachery.

Methuen was like a man awakening suddenly from a dream; the whole of this radiant pristine hill landscape became suddenly filled with shadows and omens. He put out his hand, falteringly, to touch the shoulder of the corpse—as one might put out one's hand to touch a ghost, to see if it were really flesh and blood: and to his horror it slowly toppled over. The conical black hat rolled off into the water and was borne away as swiftly as the fishing-rod of willow. He was an old man, well past sixty. He looked horrible lying there in the sunlight in his tattered soutane.

Methuen, after taking a sounding, crossed the river on a shelf of pebbles and once he was on the opposite bank tried to calculate the firing-position of the assassin. The grass was dense enough for footprints, but higher up the stone side of the bank defeated him. But it was not footprints he was looking for. He cast about like a bloodhound gradually worming his way up the steep bank, holding on to the bushes and hoisting himself up with the branches of trees. Every now and again he took a bearing on the fatal tree which faced him across the river, and after a quarter of an hour he judged himself to be approximately in the firing-position from which the old monk had been shot. He circled among the bushes and at last came upon what he sought—a pile of ejected cartridge-cases—lying at the foot of a fir tree. Turning them over in his fingers he recognized them as the type which is used to feed a sub-machine-gun.

He slipped them into his pocket and after a last glance at the fateful tree with the figure sprawled under it, turned back into the bushes and resumed his journey in the direction of the ravine, full of thoughtfulness. Nor did he turn aside to busy himself with speculations about fishing in those tempting pools, for all of a sudden the woods around seemed to have become peopled by an army of invisible eyes which watched his every movement. This brief attack of nerves he withstood with equanimity; he had often experienced it at the outset of a dangerous operation. But he was grateful in a way for the incident of the dead fisherman as it had awoken him from the feeling of false security into which he had been lulled by the landscape.

He retrieved his pack and followed the twisting path above the river for a few hundred yards until he came to a spur shaded by a huge walnut tree which cast an inky shadow over the cliff; somewhere in this shadow was the entrance to a cave, and he quickened his steps to reach it. The entrance lay at an angle to the main cliff-wall, admirably camouflaged by scrub and the shadow of the tree.

Delighted to find his memory still accurate, he was about to enter the cave-mouth, pistol in hand lest it should already be occupied by a man or an animal, when a thin hissing made him recoil. An enormous yellow viper, flattened among its own dusty coils, barred the entrance. Methuen paused, squinting at it along the sights of his revolver, reluctant to start the tenancy of his new headquarters by firing a shot. The viper hissed once again and its forked tongue flickered in its wicked little head. Methuen stood for a whole minute reflecting. In his heavy boots he had little enough to fear from it and from his memories of the cave he knew that there was a high stone platform which could be used as a bed. If he could live and let live: or rather if the viper could live and let live.…

“Now, my beauty,” he said coaxingly, “take it easy,” and edged his way softly past the reptile into the cave. It hissed again, but did not move, perhaps out of drowsiness, or perhaps because it had eaten a heavy meal of mayflies. Once inside he switched on his torch and confirmed his memories of that long-lost week-end when they had sheltered here from a storm. Here was a wide stone platform, ideally suited for a bed; and here at the farther end was a long fault in the rock which made a natural chimney against which a fire could be lighted. “So far,” he said, “so good.”

He set to work to put his house in order with the methodical deftness that only long practice can give, ignoring the snake which stayed sunning itself at the mouth of the cave. First he laid out his kit and then, taking a clasp knife, cut himself some branches of greenery for a mattress. The transport of these caused the snake a good deal of alarm, but it was already showing signs of getting used to him and he ignored it, confident that if it did sting him it would never penetrate the heavy boots he wore. His bed made up for the night, he next gathered himself some firewood from a nearby clearing where some trees had been felled, leaving a litter of chips and bark admirable for the purpose. These basic points of housekeeping once settled, he returned to the snake and poured out a few drops of tea from his little Thermos as a peace-offering, but it was obviously a gesture which awoke no comprehension in the reptile for it squirmed away from him, hissing savagely—yet, he thought, more in sorrow than in anger. “All right. All right,” he said soothingly and left it to its own devices.

Evening was rapidly settling over the mountains now and having shed all his kit except his pistol and glasses he felt very much more at ease. From the shadow of the cave-mouth he explored the whole terrain with great care, methodically sweeping the mauve contours of the hills. There was no sign of movement, save where the wind ruffled the tree-tops on the crest opposite. He sat quietly on a stone and drank in that quietness, punctuated only by the distant whistle of a train in the stone cuttings above the Ibar river, or the shuffle of maize stalks in the fields below him. The babble of the Studenitsa was silenced by the moss-lined pools into which it curled, and here Methuen saw the fish rising languidly to the flies which dotted the surface.

It was more than human nature could stand, this evidence of the evening rise and, hastening back to the cave he unearthed his trout-rod and set off down the slope, solacing his conscience with a lie: “I know it's too dangerous to fish to-night,” he said, “but it would be a good idea to assemble my rod and hide it in a convenient place by the river, ready for emergencies.” His conscience was not taken in; and indeed when he arrived at the nearest pool he discovered a spot so well hidden from view on every side that he could not resist making what he described to himself as “just a practice cast or two”.

In a matter of moments he had a glittering gasping trout beating its life out in the grass upon which he sat, and he was just stuffing it into the pocket of his duffle coat when a rustle in the bushes behind him, but some way up the hill, startled him. He pushed the rod into the bushes and lay for a while behind a bush, nursing his pistol and waiting for developments. But none came, and after a quarter of an hour he eased his cramped knees by crawling swiftly and quietly back to the great tree, feeling the trout wriggling in his pocket all the way.

The snake had retired to bed, and the yellow beam of his torch revealed no sign of it in the cave. He dumped his trout and returned to the entrance with his glasses, deciding to have one final look round before the rapidly approaching darkness made visibility impossible. Bats had begun to nicker against the sky, and from the north came the plaintive whoop of an owl. He sat drinking in the silence and full of that delightful repose which comes only to the camper who knows that he has food, fuel and shelter against the approaching night.

Here and there now came the nocturnal stirrings of animals preparing for the night. A large grey wolf came down to the water to drink and, having lifted its muzzle to sniff the air, looked once or twice in his direction with a distinct anxiety before it turned back out of sight into the dense shrub. A water-rat plopped, and a late-scampering lizard skidded among the rocks.

Methuen suddenly realized that he was tired, and yawning, made his way back to the cave, drawing a screen of branches across the mouth of it. The main chamber where he was to sleep was at right angles to the entrance so he had no fear that the light of his fire might be observed; while from what he remembered of the rock-chimney, the smoke, which emerged thirty yards higher up the hill where the air-currents were stronger, dispersed at the point of issue.

He had brought a diminutive nest of billies with him which included a small spoked grid upon which he prepared his trout after having let the fire burn up into a heap of soft grey embers; he basted it with some fat scraped from a tin of bully beef and peppered it lightly with some cummin which he had noticed growing near a cottage on his way across the hill. It tasted delicious, and he ate it with his fingers, wiping them on the duffle coat, and having eaten, took a nip at his whisky flask before settling himself finally for the night on the stone pedestal. It was only half-past six, and as yet not completely dark, but as he had work to do tomorrow he felt that a good night's sleep was the best insurance against fatigue. Despite his boasting about being in perfect condition the climb up the mountain had tired him and he took the precaution to open the little carton of talc and empty it liberally into his socks. From long experience he had learned that a blistered heel could be as dangerous to him as anything could be, and he took the precaution of massaging his feet once he had divested them of the boots which Boris had ordered for him. It was an old walker's trick inherited from the first war, when those unlucky enough to get trench feet were penalized for it.

The bed of soft dark bracken upon which his light sleeping-bag had been unrolled was sweet-smelling and comfortable, though he knew from experience that it must be changed every second day or else it collected fleas—from where he had never managed to discover. He settled himself to doze after having set out his torch and pistol within easy reach of his hand. The massive walls of the cave blotted out all the sounds of the outer world and in the silence he felt his mind slowly clearing as it returned to the incidents of the past few days—so perplexingly rich in the promise of solutions which fate had withheld.

The torturing thought of Vida's death returned once more to worry him; and then—those strange oracular messages which were being passed over the radio every few days to the little groups of
émigré
royalists in Paris and London—what did they mean? He had brought a carbon copy of the messages with him and pondering thus he was tempted to light the single candle in his kit and read them once more before he fell asleep; but he desisted and allowed himself to float downwards along the shallow river of memory to where sleep lay waiting for him like some shadowed pool.

The dial of his watch showed him that it was a quarter to four when next he woke, and he sat up with a start. Some half-irrational prompting seemed to tell him that it was the noise of footsteps which had shaken him into wakefulness. He grabbed his pistol, comforted by the cool feel of the butt, and waited. Nothing. The deep silence filled every corner of the cave, save where a single mosquito droned in the darkness. He was about to lie back again when he heard it—the clumsy scratch of boots on the bank below the cave. It was as if someone had slipped and fallen. He waited now with every muscle tense but nothing further followed so after a pause he slipped on his boots, and taking his torch in his hand went softly to the entrance where he peered through the screen of branches at a fragment of night-sky still full of fading stars.