The Moonspinners by Mary Stewart Read Free Book Online Page B

a shot. They stopped short by the corner, with a very eloquent little tableau laid out just ahead of them at the edge of a wooded gully.
    Three men and a woman stood there. The fourth man lay on his face at the gully’s edge, and it didn’t need a closer look to know that he was dead. Of the three living men, one stood back, aloof from the rest of the group, smoking – apparently unmoved. He seemed, by the very calmness of his gestures, no less than by his position, to be demonstrating his detachment from what was going on. The other two men both had rifles. It was obvious which one had fired the recent shot; this was a dark man in Cretan costume, whose weapon was still levelled. The woman was clinging to his arm, and screaming something. He shook her off roughly, cursing her for a fool, and struck her aside with his fist. At this the second man shouted at him, and started forward, threatening him with his clubbed rifle. Apart from the woman, whose distress was obvious, none of them seemed very concerned with the fate of the dead man.
    As for Mark, his first concern was Colin. Whatever the rights and wrongs of what had happened, this was not a moment to interfere. He dropped an arm across the boy’s shoulders to pull him back out of sight, with a muttered, ‘Let’s get out of this’.
    But the third man – he of the unconcerned cigarette – turned, at that unlucky moment, and saw them. He said something, and the faces of the group turned, staring, pale in the dusk. In the moment of startled stillness before any of them moved, Mark thrust Colin behind him. He had opened his mouth to shout – he was never afterwards quite sure what he had been going to say – when the man in Cretan costume threw his rifle to his shoulder, and fired again.
    Mark, as the man moved, had flinched back, half-turning to dodge out of sight. It was this movement that had saved him. He was near the gully edge, and, as he fell, the momentum of his turn, helped by the swing of the haversack on his shoulder, pitched him over it.
    The next few minutes were a confusion of pain and distorted memory. Dimly, he knew that he was falling, bumping and sprawling down among rocks and bushes, to lodge in a thicket of scrub (as he found later) some way below the path.
    He heard, as from a long way off, the woman screaming again, and a man’s voice cursing her, and then Colin’s voice, reckless with terror: ‘You’ve killed him, you stupid swine! Mark! Let me get down to him! Mark! Let me go, damn you! Mark !’
    Then the sound of a brief, fierce scuffle at the gully’s edge, a cry from Colin, bitten off short, and after that, no further sound from him. Only the woman sobbing, and calling in thick Greek upon her gods; and the voices of the two Cretans, furiously arguing about something; and then, incongruously – so incongruously that Mark, swimming away now on seas of black pain, could not even be sure it was not a dream – a man’s voice saying, in precise and unconcerned English: ‘At least take time to think it over, won’t you? Three corpses is a lot to get rid of, even here . . .’
    And that, said Lambis, was all that Mark remembered. When he awoke to consciousness, it was almost daylight. The thought of Colin got him, somehow, up out of the gully and on to the path. There he lay awhile, exhausted and bleeding, before he could summon the strength to look about him. The dead man had gone, and there was no sign of Colin. Mark had retained the dim impression that the murderers had gone inland, so he started to crawl along the path after them. He fainted several times in his passage of three hundred yards. Twice the rain revived him. The last time, Lambis found him lying there.
    Lambis’ voice had stopped. I sat for a few minutes – for ages it seemed – in silence, with my hands pressed to my cheeks, staring, without seeing it, at the bright, far-off sea. I