Figures in a Landscape

Barry England

Figures in a Landscape

CONTENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Barry England (1932–2009) was an English novelist and playwright, chiefly known for Figures in a Landscape, shortlisted for the inaugural Booker Prize. In the early fifties he joined the British Army and served as an officer in the Far East, but he later studied at RADA. He worked as an actor before starting a successful career as a playwright. The first of England’s plays to be produced was End of Conflict, starring a young Ian McKellen. Figures in a Landscape was made into a film by Joseph Losey in 1970.

ALSO BY BARRY ENGLAND

No Man’s Land

With their hands tied as usual behind their backs, they had just been paraded through the streets of a small village for the edification of the local population. While they were being formed up for the march to that night’s camp, MacConnachie had come suddenly close and whispered harshly:

‘If I go left, will you come?’

Ansell, remembering a hundred humiliations at MacConnachie’s hands, had stared at him in astonishment.

‘What?’

‘Will you come?’

‘Yes.’

‘When I move – follow!’

That was the extent of their planning. They had been beaten for talking.

Stumbling along in the fierce heat, Ansell struggled to make his brain think clearly: what have I committed myself to? what have I done? His bound arms ached at his back, his anguish of mind feeding on his torment of body. Through glazed eyes he saw MacConnachie look back towards him, and his stomach contracted with fear at the thought of what lay ahead. Not an hour before he had committed himself to a man he feared because that man despised him.

Now one of the Goons screamed at MacConnachie to face his front and MacConnachie swore back. The other prisoners murmured in anger and fear, terrified that MacConnachie would make trouble. MacConnachie spat on them with contempt.

They hate him, Ansell thought. They’ve all given up, you can see it in the way they shuffle along, heads bent in submission. MacConnachie alone remains stubborn, and they hate him for it. They’d kill him if they could – anything to be rid of that unbending reminder that they were themselves once men.

He is right. We must get away now or we never shall. But how can we hope to survive? And why pick me?

It was late afternoon. The prisoners moved raggedly in column of threes along a narrow mountain track, choking on the thick dust that their feet threw up; the weight of the sun pressed constantly over them. The air was suffocating and still, the Goons no less tired or dirty than the men they guarded.

To their right, the massive shoulder of the mountain soared up to a hidden peak; on their left was a sheer drop. Ansell had no idea how deep it was or what lay at the bottom. MacConnachie, he knew, was no better informed than himself since, from the right-hand column, he would have had even less opportunity than Ansell to peer over the edge, and Ansell had had none. He was racked by a terrible sense of having committed himself beyond his capacity; as though, by surrendering to MacConnachie’s will, he had made a promise he would be unable to keep. He felt sick with the fear of letting MacConnachie down. Try as he might, he could not feel that he yearned for freedom as MacConnachie did, with his entire body. To him it was an idea, however desirable; to MacConnachie, a palpable animal need.

The Goons were all around them, a small group to front and rear, and down each flank a single file of guards keeping pace. All were armed with burp guns. Why in the name of God doesn’t he do something? Ansell thought. His stomach fluttered in anticipation. He kept remembering the violence in MacConnachie, the crudeness and force, the unpredictability of a man too dangerous to be liked, and his legs trembled at the recurring realization that MacConnachie had chosen him. He is so much the stronger, Ansell thought; he knows the country and he speaks the language. He had that – thing about physical phenomena; that instinct.

What does he need with me?

MacConnachie put his head down, swung left and charged through the ranks of stumbling men, scattering his former comrades in every direction. One of the Goons at the edge of the precipice saw him coming and, alight with fear, struggled frantically to unsling his weapon. MacConnachie dived full length and, catching him in the face with the crown of his head, carried him over, both of them falling from view. Ansell ran forward, shut his eyes, and jumped after them.

For a moment all orientation was lost to him. He tumbled and spun dizzily, completely unaware of what was happening to his body, of whether he fell by the feet or the head. The wind tore at his face, forcing his eyelids apart and his mouth open. He tried to cry out but the echoing din deafened him. He was on the point of vomiting. The next moment he was twisting and turning his trunk in a ludicrous attempt to pull his bottom out through his bound arms. He couldn’t breathe. He screamed with terror. Then he hit the water with a stunning crash.

He came to the surface at once, unsure he had ever been under it, and began to pump his back legs with the frantic disorder of a mutilated insect. He had no idea in which direction he was swimming.

‘Ansell! Ansell!’

He came suddenly upright and found that he could stand. He started to cough.

‘Here!’

MacConnachie was fifteen feet away. He had the Goon’s head trapped between his knees, and was drowning him. The man thrashed about, swimming downwards.

‘Find the gun!’

Ansell floundered towards him through the warm, brown water.

‘Where is it?’

‘I don’t know – look for the bastard!’

In a curious, enforced slow motion Ansell danced about, feeling the tacky sludge with his feet, trying to find something hard in all that ooze. MacConnachie rode out a last contortion from the Goon and then released the body, which bobbed a moment and slid from view. Ansell said,

‘They’re shooting at us.’

‘I’m not blind!’

The bullets fell about them with the dead violence of dropped stones, barely breaking the surface of the water as they passed through it. From far above, faint popping noises sounded.

‘Here! Over here!’

MacConnachie appeared to have found the gun for, although the churned-up water was impenetrable, he was scowling down at it with fierce attention, slight movements of his head and shoulders indicating that below the surface he was performing some sort of cautious jig. Ansell wallowed over to where he stood.

‘Got my right foot under it. See if you can lever it up.’

They faced one another, two men at the centre of a river, with their arms bound tightly behind their backs and bullets all around.

‘I can’t find it.’

‘Put your foot on my leg and follow it down.’

As the toe of Ansell’s boot came down MacConnachie’s shinbone, he felt the heel knock the gun from the top of MacConnachie’s foot.

‘You stupid…!’

‘I’ve still got my foot on it.’

‘Get it underneath – lever it up.’

As he said this, MacConnachie turned his back to Ansell and lowered himself into the water, reaching behind him with groping fingers into the slime. Ansell could feel the metal slithering about on the toe of his boot. Don’t let it slip, he prayed, don’t let it fall. He eased it up with infinite caution.

‘I’ve got it!’

‘Easy, easy…’

MacConnachie was leaning right back now, only his face above the surface, his hair trailing like weed in the water. This time, it was his water-clumsy fingers that knocked the gun to the bottom again.

‘Oh sweet God Almighty!’

In a rage of frustration he turned about, plunged his head down into the filth and reappeared a moment later, the gun clamped between his teeth, his face plastered with muck and slime. This action released a vile stench which rose in bubbles to break on the air.

He grunted frantically until Ansell, interpreting him, turned his back and reached behind him for the gun. The next moment it was in his hands and they were floundering towards the bank, bullets slapping the water all about them.

Then Ansell fell. So great was his anxiety not to let MacConnachie down that he clutched the gun as though it could save him, forgetting to compose his features. Mouth open, breathing in, he swallowed.

His next clear apprehension, moments later, was of being seized by the scruff of the neck and dragged through the shallows, vomiting and retching. Then, at the touch of solid ground, his legs started to function again and MacConnachie, able to open his jaw to release him, shouted,

‘Give me the gun!’

‘I’m all right!’

But MacConnachie took it and ran for the nearest cover, crouching low. Ansell followed. They fell against the earth and lay there, gasping.

Hunched awkwardly on to his left side, MacConnachie peered up at the mountain. No scent of danger came to him from that direction. In any case, common sense told him that eight hours of heavy downhill labour lay between their late captors and themselves. But on this side of the river he could feel the faint, persistent tug of distant alarm, and he turned his attention to their new territory.

Immediately ahead lay a small area of pimple and scrub. This gave way almost at once to the first slopes of a range of hills that stretched from left to right to fill their entire field of vision with solid undulation. Somewhere beyond these hills, though hidden now by the nearer crests, stood the peaks of a vast mountain range that had become his objective the moment he had sighted them two days before. Once in those mountains, they would have a chance; the initiative would pass from the Goons to them. But first they had to establish their break. Then they had to get there. He rose and said,

‘Come on. We must move.’

‘Which way?’

‘Into the hills. We must be in high ground by nightfall.’

Now that he had recovered, Ansell felt ashamed and frighteningly exposed. He rose and followed MacConnachie with relief.

‘Sorry about being sick.’

MacConnachie grunted without interest. He had assumed the poised, characteristic posture that Ansell had seen so often before: the curious animal lope of a man sensing the ground ahead, probing it not only with eyes and ears, but with that strange inner device which Ansell neither possessed nor understood, but which he had learned to envy and trust. Feeling, as he always did, released by this, he began to think ahead, saying,

‘What about water?’

‘What about it?’

MacConnachie didn’t turn but continued to scent the ground ahead, as Ansell himself sought constantly for danger to the flanks and rear.

‘We must have some.’

‘So?’

‘We can’t go too far from the river.’

‘We’ve got to get out of the first box of search.’

‘There may not be a village up there for miles.’

‘There isn’t.’

Ansell accepted this without question: if MacConnachie said there was no village, there was none. The fact that MacConnachie had never walked this ground before was immaterial to his particular abilities. Ansell said,

‘Then we’ve got to stay close enough to raid a village down here. There’ll be plenty of them on the river.’

For some moments MacConnachie walked on in silence; then he said,

‘Damn, you’re right.’

Silence fell again. Ansell was unable to discern movement of any kind on any quarter. He found it curious and disconcerting that they should appear, in the circumstances, so utterly alone. He felt threatened. Suddenly MacConnachie pulled violently against his bonds.

‘We’ve got to get our hands free! We’ve got to!’

‘I know.’

They had reached the beginnings of the foot-hills now, and their movements took on a new rhythm as they started to climb.

To the front their field of view was dangerously limited: they could see to a false crest at the top of the slope but, apart from the tips of the hills beyond, nothing more. They walked in the soldier’s most ill-starred territory, the low ground, and it made them uneasy. MacConnachie said,

‘We’ll get to the top. If it isn’t crawling with Goons, we’ll lie up and come down tonight.’

‘Right.’

‘We can go without food, but we can’t without water.’

The terrain grew steeper until, fifty feet below the crest, they were forced to crawl without the aid of their arms. It was the progress of the snake, and by the time they reached the jutting edge above, their cheeks and knees were raw and bleeding, and what had remained of the arms of their uniform jackets had been torn away. Each man had fragments of crust adhering to the corners of his eyes and mouth, and the foul vapour that rose from their clothes under the late sun choked them.

As they wriggled over the lip of the promontory they found that it was only a small, tufted shelf from which, not ten feet ahead, the slope rose smoothly again to another false crest.

‘Oh Christ,’ said MacConnachie.

‘Quite,’ said Ansell, and lay his face in the dirt to rest.

Something had been achieved: looking back, MacConnachie saw that although they had travelled only two hundred yards from the river, their increased elevation had revealed the outskirts of a small fishing village to their left. There was a wooden jetty with one or two native craft lying against it, a handful of villagers in attendance, but, so far as he could see, no sign of danger. He told Ansell to keep watch. Then he settled to examine the cluster of huts. Within moments he had located the village square and, most important, the well. The kid was right. They had to have water. He set his eyes to absorb and fix a plan of the village in his mind. He trusted his eyes, as he trusted every part of his physical mechanism, not to let him down. They were the adjuncts of his instinct; he had no need to think.

After minutes of complete stillness MacConnachie looked at the sky.

‘One hour to sunset. Kid, where’s that camp?’

‘Which one?’

‘The one they were marching us to.’

‘How would I know?’

MacConnachie looked at him sharply.

‘Use your bloody brains! Think!’

‘One hour to sunset? We usually get in about eight or nine. That’s three hours from the top. Not far, the condition they’re in.

‘They’ll look for us tonight, then.’

‘They might. But with trucks and helicopters, why should they hurry?’

‘Um… look.’

MacConnachie nodded towards the village, indicating it to Ansell for the first time.

‘That’s handy.’

‘We’ve got to get higher up. We must see forward before we turn back.’

As MacConnachie levered himself upright, the gun clutched awkwardly behind him, Ansell suddenly hissed,

‘Get down! ’

MacConnachie dropped at once.

‘What?’

‘There’s someone coming!’

‘Where?’

‘Up there!’

MacConnachie wriggled quickly along to the end of the shelf, where he could lay his face against the rising ground and look up the hillside. A civilian Goon was hopping sure-footedly down towards them, turned a little sideways to his own line of march and travelling the steep slope on confident, muscular legs: a fisherman, perhaps, from the near-by village. If he kept to his present course he would land beside them. Keep coming, MacConnachie thought; just keep coming.

Ansell came up beside MacConnachie and laid his face close to the big man’s. MacConnachie muttered,

‘If he’ll stop, just long enough, he’s a dead man.’

Ansell looked at the Goon, then back to MacConnachie.

‘Why?’

The man was closing rapidly.

‘Get to the other end of the ledge! Keep hidden!’

There was no time to argue. Stiff with tension, Ansell backed as quickly as he could, never taking his eyes from MacConnachie, one foot against the bottom of the cut to guide him. He saw MacConnachie arch back, drop the gun, and push it out with his foot into the open area of the shelf. MacConnachie then flattened himself into the ground until even Ansell had difficulty in locating his exact position. Ansell did his best to emulate him.