then sent the weapon skidding across the floor towards her and she
pounced upon it with another gleeful shriek and pranced before the
cringing youth, brandishing the knife while the watchers shouted
encouragement to her.
The captive began to twist and struggle, watching the knife with the
fixed concentration of despair and terror, but the two tall guards held
him easily, chuckling like a pair of gaunt ogres, watching the knife
also.
The old woman let out one more high-pitched shriek, and leapt at him
the long skinny black arm lunged out, the point of the blade aimed at
his heart. The woman's strength was too frail to drive it home, and
the point struck bone and glanced aside, skidding around the ribcage,
opening a long shallow cut that exposed the white bone in its depths
for the instant before blood flooded out between the lips of the wound.
A howl of delight went up from the assembled Gallas, and they goaded on
the avenger with mocking cries and yips like those of a pack of excited
jackals.
Again and again the old woman struck, and the youth kicked and
struggled, his guards roaring with laughter and the blood from the
shallow wounds flying and sparkling in the lamplight, splattering the
old woman's knife arm and speckling her angry screeching face. Her
frustration made her blows more wild and feeble.
Unable to penetrate his chest, she turned her attack upon his face. One
blow split his nose and upper lip, and the next slashed across his eye,
turning the socket instantly into a dark blood-glutted hole. The
guards let him fall to the floor.
The old woman leapt upon his chest and, clinging to him like a huge,
grotesque vampire bat, she began to saw determinedly at the youth's
throat until at last the carotid artery erupted, dousing her robes and
puddling the floor on which they rolled together while the Galla
watchers roared their approbation.
Only then could Vicky move; she leapt to her feet and pushed her way
through the throng that jammed the doorway and ran out into the cool
night. She realized that her blouse was damp with the sweat of nausea
and she leaned against the stem of a cosa flora tree, trying to fight
it, unavailingly; then she doubled over and retched tearingly, choking
up her horror.
The horror stayed with her for many hours, denying her the sleep her
body craved. She lay alone in the small room that Lij Mikhael had
ordered for her, and listened to the drums beating and the shouts of
laughter and bursts of singing from the Galla encampment amongst the
cosa flora trees.
When she slept at last, it was not for long, and then she awoke to a
soft tickling movement on her skin and the first fiery itch across her
belly.
Disgusted by the loathsome touch she threw aside the single blanket and
lit the candle. Across the flat smooth plain of her belly, the bites
of vermin were strung like a girdle of angry red beads and she
shuddered, her whole body crawling with the thought of it.
She spent what remained of the night huddled uncomfortably on the floor
of the armoured car. The mountain cold struck through the steel of
Miss Wobbly's hull, and Vicky shivered into the dawn, scratching
morosely at the hot lumps across her stomach. Then she filled the
growling ache of her empty stomach with a tin of cold corned beef from
the emergency rations in the locker under the driver's seat, before
driving up the slope of the western pass to the German mission station
where she experienced the first lift of spirits since the horrors of
the night.
Sara had responded almost miraculously to the treatment she was
receiving, and although she was still weak and a little shaky, the
fever had abated, and she was once more able to give Vicky the benefit
of her vast wisdom and worldly experience.
Vicky sat beside the narrow iron bedstead in the overcrowded ward,
while other patients coughed and groaned around her, and held Sara's
thin dry hand from which the flesh seemed to have wasted overnight and
poured out to her the horrors still pent up inside her.
"Ras Kullah," Sara made a moue of disgust. "He is a degenerate man,
that one. Did he have his milk cows with him?" Vicky was for a moment
at a loss, until she remembered the two madonnas. "His men scour the
mountains to keep him supplied with pretty young mothers in full milk
ugh!" She shuddered theatrically, and Vicky felt her unsettled stomach
quail. "That and his hemp pipe and the sight of blood. He is an
animal. His people are animals they have been our enemies since the
time of Solomon, and it shames me now that we must have them to fight
beside us." Then she changed the subject in her usual mercurial
fashion.
"Will you go down the pass again today?"
"Yes," Vicky said, and Sara sighed.
"The doctor says that I cannot go with you not for many days still."
"I will fetch you, as soon as you are ready."
"No. No," she protested. "It is shorter and easier on horseback. I
will come immediately but until then carry My love to Gregorius. Tell
him my heart beats with great fury for him, and he walks through my
thoughts eternally."
