"Courtney 20th Century 01 - The Burning Shore" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Wilbur)

THE BURNING SHORE

Wilbur Smith

So have I heard on Afric's burning shore, A hungry lion give a grievous roar.

William Barnes Rhodes, Bombastes Furioso, sc. IV

Michael awoke to the mindless fury of the guns.

It was an obscene ritual celebrated in the darkness before each dawn in which the massed banks of artillery batteries on both sides of the ridges made their savage sacrifice to the gods of war.

Michael lay in the darkness under the weight of six woollen blankets and -watched the gunfire flicker through the canvas of the tent like some dreadful aurora borealis.

The blankets felt cold and clammy as a dead man's skin, and light rain spattered the canvas above his head. The cold struck through his bedclothes and yet he felt a glow of hope. In this weather they could not fly.

False hope withered swiftly, for when Michael listened again to the guns, this time more intently, he could judge the direction of the wind by the sound of the barrage.

The wind had gone back into the south-west, muting the cacophony, and he shivered and pulled the blankets up under-his chin. As if to confirm his estimate, the light breeze dropped suddenly. The patter of rain on canvas eased and then ceased. Outside he could hear the trees of the apple orchard dripping in the silence, and then there was an abrupt gust so that the branches shook themselves like a spaniel coming out of the water and released a heavy fall of drops on to the roof of the tent.

He decided that he would not reach across to his gold half-hunter on the inverted packing-case which acted as a bedside table. It would be time all too soon. So he snuggled down in the blankets and thought about his fear.

All of them suffered under the affliction of fear, and yet the rigid conventions under which they lived and flew and died forbade them to speak of it, forbade them to refer to it in even the most oblique terms.

Would it have been a comfort, Michael wondered, if last night he had been able to say to Andrew as they sat with the bottle of whisky between them, discussing this morning's mission, Andrew, I'm frightened gutless by what we are going to do?

He grinned in the darkness as he imagined Andrew's embarrassment, yet he knew that Andrew shared it with him. It was in his eyes, and in the way the little nerve twitched and jumped in his cheek so that he had constantly to touch it with a fingertip to still it. All the old hands had their little idiosyncracies; Andrew had the nerve in his cheek and the empty cigarette-holder which he sucked like an infant's comforter. Michael ground his teeth in his sleep so loudly that he woke himself; he bit the nail of his left thumb down into the quick and every few minutes he blew on the fingers of his right hand as though he had just touched a hot coal.

The fear drove them all a little mad, and forced them to drink far too much, enough to destroy the reflexes of normal men. But they were not normal men and the alcohol did not seem to affect them, it did not dull their eyesight nor slow their feet on the rudder bars. Normal men died in the first three weeks, they went down flaming like fir trees in a forest fire, or they smashed into the doughy, shell-ploughed earth with a force that shattered their bones and drove the splinters out through their flesh.

Andrew had survived fourteen months, and Michael eleven, many times the life-span that the gods of war had allotted to the men who flew these frail contraptions of wire and wood and canvas. So they twitched and fidgeted, and blinked their eyes, and drank whisky with every thing, and laughed in a quick loud bray and then shuffled their feet with embarrassment, and lay in their cots at dawn, stiff with terror, and listened for footsteps.

Michael heard the footsteps now, it must be later than he had realized. Outside the tent Biggs muttered a curse as he splashed into a puddle, and his boots made obscene little sucking noises in the mud. His bull's-eye lantern glowed through the canvas as he fumbled with the flap and then he stooped into the tent.

Top of the mornin& Sir, his tone was cheerful, but he kept it low, out of courtesy to the officers in the neighbouring tents who were not flying this morning wind has gone sou'-sou'-west, Sir, and she's clearing something lovely, she is. Stars shining out over Cambrai - Biggs set the tray he carried on the packing case and bustled about the tent, picking up the clothing that Michael had dropped on the duck-boards the night before.

What time is it? Michael went through the pantomime of awaking from deep sleep, stretching and yawning so that Biggs would not know about the hour of terror, so that the legend would not be tarnished.

Half-past five, Sir. Biggs finished folding the clothes away, then came back to hand him the thick china mug of cocoa. And Lord Killigerran is up and in the mess already. I Bloody man is made of iron, Michael groaned, and Biggs picked the empty whisky bottle off the floor beneath the cot and placed it on the tray.

Michael drained the cocoa while Biggs worked up a lather in the shaving mug and then held the polished steel mirror and the lantern while Michael shaved with the straight razor, sitting up in his cot with the blankets over his shoulders.

What's the book? Michael demanded, his voice nasal as he pinched his own nostrils and lifted the tip of his nose to shave his upper lip.

They are giving three to one that you and the major take them both with no butcher's bill. Michael wiped the razor while he considered the odds.

The sergeant rigger who ran the betting had operated his own book at Ascot and Aintree before the war. He had decided that there was one chance in three that either Andrew or Michael, or both of them, would be dead by noon, no butcher's bill, no casualties.

Bit steep, don't you think, Biggs? Michael asked. I mean, both of them, damn it? I've put half a crack on you, sir, Biggs demurred.