“Five men — at least five men. There are also three women — I do not think they could walk far. How many miles is it to your village?”
“Miles?” Telak smiled. “A man can walk there in ten minutes.” He spoke again to his father, who nodded several times as he listened, then turned and spoke briefly to the young boy by his side. The boy listened intently, appeared to repeat instructions, flashed his white teeth in a smile at Nicolson and Vannier, turned quickly and ran off in the direction he had come.
“We will help you,” Telak said. “My young brother has gone to the village — he will bring strong men and litters for the sick. Come, let us go to your friends.”
He turned, led the way into an apparently impenetrable patch of forest and undergrowth, skirted the swamp through which Nicolson and Vannier had so lately waded, and led them back on to the path again, all inside a minute. Vannier caught Nicolson’s eye and grinned.
“Makes you feel stupid, doesn’t it? Easy enough when you know how.”
“What does your friend say?” Telak asked.
“Just that he wishes we had had you with us earlier on,” Nicolson explained. “We spent most of our time wading up to the waists in swamps.”
Trikah grunted an inquiry, listend to Telak, then muttered to himself. Telak grinned.
“My father says only fools and very little children get their feet wet in the forest. He forgets that one must be used to it.” He grinned again. “He forgets the time — the only time — he was ever in a car. When it moved off he jumped over the side and hurt his leg badly.”
Telak talked freely as they walked along through the filtered green light of the jungle. He made it quite obvious that he and his father were in no way pro-British. Nor were they pro-Dutch nor pro-Japanese. They were just pro-Indonesian, he explained, and wanted their country for themselves. But, once the war was over, if they had to negotiate with anyone for the freedom of their country, they would rather do it with the British or the Dutch. The Japanese made great protestations of friendship, but once the Japanese moved in on a country, they never moved out again. They asked for what they called co-operation, Telak said, and already they were showing that if they didn’t get it one way, willingly, they would get it another — with the bayonet and the tommy-gun.
Nicolson looked at him in quick surprise and sudden dismay.
“There are Japanese near here? They have landed, then?”
“Already they are here,” Telak said gravely. He gestured to the east. “The British and Americans still fight, but they cannot last long. Already the Japanese have taken over a dozen towns and villages within a hundred miles of here. They have — what do you call it — a garrison, they have a garrison at Bantuk. A big garrison, with a colonel in charge. Colonel Kiseki.” Telak shook his head like a man shivering with cold. “Colonel Kiseki is not human. He is an animal, a jungle animal. But the jungle animals kill only when they have to. Kiseki would tear the arm off a man — or a little child — as a thoughtless child would pull the wings off a fly.”
“How far away from your village is this town?” Nicolson asked slowly.
“Bantuk?”
“Where the garrison is. Yes.”
“Four miles. No more.”
“Four miles ! You would shelter us — you would shelter so many within four miles of the Japanese ! But what will happen
“I am afraid that you cannot stay long with us,” Telak interrupted gravely. “My father, Trikah, says it will not be safe. It will not be safe for you or for us. There are spies, there are those who carry information for reward, even among our own people. The Japanese would capture you and take my father, my mother, my brothers and myself to Bantuk.”
“As hostages?”
“That is what they would call it.” Telak smiled sadly. “The hostages of the Japanese never return to their villages. They are a cruel people. That is why we help you.”
“How long can we stay?”
Telak consulted briefly with his father, then turned to Nicolson. “As long as it is safe. We will feed you, give you a hut for sleeping and the old women of our village can heal any wounds. Perhaps you can stay three days, but no more.”
“And then?”
Telak shrugged his shoulders and led the way through the jungle in silence.
They were met by McKinnon less than a hundred yards from where the boat had beached the previous night. He was running, staggering from side to side, and not because of his stiffened leg: blood was trickling down into his eyes from a bruised cut in the middle of his forehead, and Nicolson knew without being told who must have been responsible.
Furious, mortified and blaming only himself, McKinnon was very bitter, but no fault could really be attached to him. The first he had known of the heavy hurtling stone that had knocked him unconscious was when he had recovered his senses and found it lying by his side, and no man can watch three others, indefinitely and simultaneously. The others had been powerless, for the concerted attack had been carefully planned and the only carbine in the company snatched by Siran from McKinnon even as he fell. Siran and his men, Findhorn said, had made off towards the north-east.
McKinnon was all for pursuing the men, and Nicolson, who knew that Siran, alive and free, was a potential danger no matter where he was, agreed. But Telak vetoed the idea. Impossible to find them in the jungle in the first place, he said: and searching for a man with a machine-gun who could pick his place of ambush and then lie still was a very quick way of committing suicide. Nicolson acknowledged the verdict of an expert and led them down to the beach.
Just over two hours later the last of the litter-bearers entered Trikah’s kampong — the village clearing in the jungle. Small thin men but amazingly tough and enduring, most of the bearers had made the journey without being relieved of their loads or once stopping.
Trikah, the chief was as good as his promise. Old women washed and cleaned suppurating wounds, covered them with cool, soothing pastes, covered these in turn with large leaves and bound the whole with strips of cotton. After that, all were fed, and fed magnificently. More correctly, they were given a splendid selection of food to eat — chicken, turtle eggs, warmed rice, durians, crushed prawns, yams, sweet boiled roots and dried fish: but hunger had long since died, they had lived too long with starvation to do anything but token justice to the spread before them. Besides, the paramount need was not for food, but for sleep, and sleep they soon had. No beds, no hammocks, no couch of twigs or grass: just cocoa-nut matting on the swept earthen floor of a hut, and that was enough, more than enough, it was paradise for those who had been without a night’s sleep for longer than their weary minds could remember. They slept like the dead, lost beyond call in the bottomless pit of exhaustion.
When Nicolson awoke, the sun had long gone and night had fallen over the jungle. A still, hushed night, and a still, hushed jungle. No chatter of monkeys, no cries of night birds, no sounds of any life at all. Just the hush and the stillness and the dark. Inside the hut it was hushed, too, and still, but not dark: two smoking oil lamps hung from poles near the entrance.
Nicolson had been deep sunk in drugged, uncaring sleep. He might have slept for hours longer, and would have, given the opportunity. But he did not awake naturally. He awoke because of a sharp stab of pain that reached down even through the mists of sleep, a strange unknown pain that pierced his skin, cold and sharp and heavy. He awoke with a Japanese bayonet at his throat.
The bayonet was long and sharp and ugly, its oiled surface gleaming evilly in the flickering light. Down its length ran the notched runnel for blood. At a distance of a few inches, it looked like a huge metallic ditch, and into Nicolson’s uncomprehending, half-waking mind flickered evil visions of slaughter and mass burials. And then the film was. away from his eyes, and his gaze travelled with sick fascination up the shining length of the bayonet, up to the barrel of the rifle and the bronzed brown hand that held it half-way down, beyond the bolt and magazine to the wooden stock and the other bronzed hand, beyond that again to the belted grey-green uniform and the face beneath the visored cap, a face with the lips drawn far back in a smile that was no smile at all, but an animal snarl of hate and expectancy, a sneering malignancy well matched by the blood lust in the porcine little eyes. Even as Nicolson watched, the lips drew still further back over the long, canine teeth, and the man leaned again on the stock of his rifle. The point of the bayonet went right through the skin at the base of the throat. Nicolson felt the waves of nausea flood over him, almost like the waves of the sea. The lights in the hut seemed to flicker and grow dim.