Red Lotus (27 page)

He had seen Maria as his gentle, simple shepherdess, and he had come here often to perpetuate her memory.

Vaguely she wondered about death as she lay in his arms. It was all about them, but her fear had gone. The strange calmness of unknowable things seemed to stretch away and away, through the sealed valley and the island to the sea—on, on into a vast infinity where there were no tears, no regrets, no sorrow.

Suspended above it, she felt it in the comfort of Philip's arms.

"Try to sleep," he encouraged after a while. "It won't be dark for very long."

Her hands clung to him.

"Don't leave me, Philip."

"No," he said, "I won't leave you."

She closed her eyes, thinking that she would not sleep. The fire was warm and comforting, with a kindly yellow glow. It wrapped her round, laying the fingers of drowsiness across her brows. The coffee, she remembered, had been sweet and warm. . . .

An hour later—two—three—she opened her eyes to the awareness of light. She had no idea what time it was, but the light she saw was surely not the dawn. It filtered in from the room beyond where she lay, through a faint grey oblong which had once been a window. She had been in that room, but now she was lying in the adjacent bedroom. Philip must have carried her there while she slept.

Strange that she had not felt any movement, the strengthening grip of his arms, the increased beating of his heart as he had borne her through the communicating door. Had the coffee he had given her to drink been slightly drugged?

He had laid her on the bed and drawn a blanket over her and she had slept, mercifully unconscious of the passing hours.

The light she watched was faint, a pale, pearly grey against the encircling darkness. Was Philip, too, asleep?

She put the blanket aside, trying to stifle the sudden fear in her heart, and sat up. There was no sound from the other room, no sound in all the quiet house. No sound in the valley but the occasional sharp snap of a tree falling unobserved in the darkness. The heat, she realized, was stifling. It was probably that and the strengthening light which had wakened her, yet it was no more than the false dawn which quivered above the shattered mountain peaks.

Silently she got to her feet and as silently crossed the room. If Philip were asleep she would not disturb him, although she longed for the comfort of his arms, for the security which his steady gaze could bring her in this moment of fear.

Beads of perspiration stood out along the line of her upper lip and on her brow, and the oppressive heat caught at her throat. The lava was nearer now. It had crept down, inch by inch, during the night, and the whole air was full of the heavy, sulphurous smell of it. She could feel it advancing on the house like a cautious beast of prey, waiting to spring, but she would not let herself think of the moment when it would be upon them.

Reaching the open doorway, she looked into the room beyond.

Philip had allowed the fire to die, but there was still a glowing ember or two on the wide stone hearth which could be blown quickly into a flame. There was no need for a fire's comforting warmth now; the scorching breath of the volcano had come too near.

She looked at the fragments of charred wood, fascinated for a moment, and then she was aware of Philip standing beside the desk in the corner. He was half turned from her, but the slow, deliberate movements of his hands could not be mistaken. She heard the little click of metal on metal as he dropped the bullets into place and the snap of the safety-catch against the barrel as he drove it home. Then, slowly and deliberately, he opened the shallow centre drawer of the desk and laid the revolver in it, ready.

He stood looking down at it for several seconds, his profile etched against the strengthening light, and then

he closed the drawer and turned to find her watching him

For a split second Felicity thought that the stern jaw was set in anger, and then he held out his arms to her and she ran to their shelter

He held her without speaking, closely, protectingly, his free hand caressing her hair, her head pressed down against the taut hardness of his chest.

"Say—'All right, querida! " she whispered shakily.

He turned her face up, kissing the tears from her eyes. "All right, querida!" he repeated. "All right!"

He held her as the light grew and strengthened behind them, and then, very gently, he put her from him and went to the window.

When he came back his mouth was grim and his eyes were hard, and she did not ask him what their chances were. At least they had survived the night.

"We've got to make a bolt for it," he said briskly. "We've got to try the mountains."

He looked at her searchingly, seeming to be satisfied with what he saw, although he stood quite deliberately between her and the window alcove, blocking her view of the upper valley and the way to the road.

Or what remained of the road, she thought.

"We'll take what we can with us," he said, "but first of all we ought to get something to drink. Something hot. It will be piercingly cold once we begin to climb."

Briefly, almost matter-of-factly he began to check over the store of food still left in the cupboard on the wall. There was coffee and some maize biscuits and a few thin wafers of goat cheese wrapped in a piece of white muslin He searched for a flask as Felicity knelt down to stir the wood under the kettle to a blaze, and when she had made more coffee he put the things he had collected into a canvas satchel and came to stand beside her. She thought that his eyes looked bitter, but he did not speak.

The water in the kettle steamed its warning and he poured it over the coffee powder he had put into the flask. Then he poured the coffee from the jug into the two cups she had put ready on the table.

"Don't put anything into mine this time, Philip," she said. "I can manage without it."

He turned, his mouth relaxing in a smile.

"I wanted you to get some sleep," he said. "But now I think I want your company more." He took her by the shoulders, looking down long and searchingly into her eyes. "We're getting out, Felicity," he said between his teeth. "Somehow!"

She did not look behind her at the encroaching lava as they left the house. She did not need to look. It was near enough to be felt.

Philip gave it one backward glance, but that was all. She had seen him take the revolver from the desk along with some papers and stuff it into the holster on his belt, but she had not looked at that either. He meant that they should die quickly, if they had to die.

Immediately they had left the house they were forced to climb, with a pathetic little procession of white goats leaping ahead of them, as if bent on showing them the way.

To Felicity the face of the mountain looked inexorable, frowning down at them with a gaunt and forbidding austerity as they toiled upwards. There seemed to be no footholds, yet Phil
i
p found them for her, again and again.

It was better, she thought, not to look up at the grey façade of rock which seemed to repulse them with every step they took. There was nothing to be seen but rock, nothing but the jagged pinnacles high above them, silhouetted remotely against the sky.

It was a sky flushed with the pearly-pink streamers of dawn now, a warm, friendly sky, although it looked down upon a valley torn asunder. Huge rocks and scorched trees lay in the path of the lava, overlaid by a deathly stillness. No life that could possibly escape had remained in that stricken place. No bird sang. There was not even a hovering hawk to chill their blood with its suggestion of death.

No sound but the frightened bleating of the white goats as they leaped from crag to crag where no human foot could possibly follow.

After an hour, when they had climbed only a little way, Philip drew Felicity into the shelter of a rock. A penetrating coldness had come down from the mountain-tops with the dawn, chilling them to the bone in spite of the

physical effort they had been making, and he unscrewed the flask top and held it out to her.

"Shouldn't we keep it a little longer?" she asked stiffly. "Till we really need it, Philip."

"There's plenty," he said, his eyes scanning the mountainsides. "Plenty for our needs."

Her teeth chattered against the rim of the cup as she drank and she felt ashamed because part of her unsteadiness was fear.

Philip put a protective arm about her shoulders.

"The sun will soon be up," he promised, but she knew that when the sun came they would be exhaustingly exposed to its merciless glare.

Their position seemed hopeless, but Philip would not discuss it in such a light.

"We've got to keep moving," he said. "We've got to put as much distance as we can between us and the valley floor." He glanced at his watch. "The average lava flow moves at about twenty yards a minute. It's a ponderous, slow affair, and we've got to beat it."

She saw the small, quick pulse hammering in his cheek and the determined set of his lips as the blue eyes travelled to the face of the rock above them and on to the distant mountain rim.

"I wish," she said, "that you had gone on alone."

"Don't talk nonsense," he admonished. "I shall never be able to forget that you came here in search of me."

His voice was suddenly humble, unlike the voice she knew so well.

"I had to come," she said. "There was no other way, Philip."

He took her by the hand, helping her to her feet before her limbs had time to stiffen.

"We've got to go on," he repeated. "I'm going to rope us together in a minute, but I think you should be able to reach the next ledge before I need to do that."

It took them more than an hour to reach the narrow band of rock and loose scree which he had indicated, and when she stumbled on to it she all but confessed herself beaten. She was completely exhausted. They had scarcely exchanged more than half a dozen words during the perilous ascent, and these had been Philip's barked commands uttered in a voice that was sharp with tension.

She had no experience of climbing and the effort she had made on the slopes of The Peak was child's play to this. Her breath sobbed out between her teeth as if it had been cut from her lungs by a sharp knife and her knees had all but given way as Philip had pulled her up the last difficult stretch.

Something in her longed to tell him that she couldn't go on, but she crushed it down. She could not let him see her cowardice. He would despise her for the weakness, turn from her, perhaps, in contempt.

Yet she had found nothing but kindness and compassion in him. The reason for his accident had been that he had gone back to find a straying kid severed from the herd in a moment of panic as the frightened little animals had plunged down from the quivering mountain crest.

"There isn't any shelter here, but we'll rest for a bit," he said. "You're tired."

There was nothing for her to rest against but the bare face of the rock. He put his arm along it and she slid down against it, pillowing her head on his shoulder.

For a long moment he did not move. Then, almost imperceptibly, she felt him stiffen. He appeared to be listening, his ears more attuned to the silence than her own.

Another eruption? Her heart contracted at the prospect, but Philip had thrown back his head and was looking at the sky.

"A plane?" she whispered, wondering why she had never thought of it before.

"Yes," he said. His mouth was still grimly compressed. He would not buoy her up with any false hope of their deliverance. "Do you hear it now?"

She nodded eagerly, her heart surging upwards with that joyous sound as her eyes attempted to follow his.

"Over there!" he said, pointing to the left of the sun which had now topped the highest peaks. "A plane. A helicopter, by the look of it!"

There was sudden, swift elation in his eyes now, the forerunner of hope, but there was caution, too, in his voice as he added:

"It may be on a routine flight, but we've got to make them see us, whatever it is."

He pulled off his shirt and began to wave it as the plane came nearer, a scrap of white silk sending out its signal of distress from an infinitesimal foothold on the bare mountain face. Would it—could it possibly be seen from all that distance away? Would anybody be looking out? The eruption would have been recorded, of course, but this might be no more than an observation flight to assess the damage which had been done by the throw-out of lava or even just to plot the position of the new craters for future geographical research.

It could be anything or nothing. It could be· release or the abandonment of hope.

The violently-rotating blades brought the small black object in the sky slowly nearer. The helicopter reached the valley, hovered above it, and moved gradually away. Felicity's heart sank into utter defeat. She knew that she could not go on; she knew that she would never be able to scale these dreadful, precipitous rock faces, even with Philip's help. She was completely exhausted.

She could not look at Philip because she knew that he would not go on without her.

The noise of the helicopter died away, growing fainter and fainter in the distance, and the silence descended on the valley again. More deeply than before, Felicity thought. Neither of them could trust themselves to speak. Philip sat with his head in his hands for a moment, his brows deeply furrowed, and Felicity stared at him without thought. Her brain felt numb. She was beyond reasoning now, frozen into a silence which was part of the heavy, brooding silence all about them.