War Children by Gerard Whelan Read Free Book Online Page B

Some of them, she saw, were making for the river, to ford it. There was no sign of any answering gunfire. The attackers had cut and run: they’d been taken by surprise, and ambushed in their turn. A few of them lay dead or wounded in the field and on the road. She saw an Auxie with a pistol standing over one wounded man. As Statia watched, the Auxie reached out the pistol carefully and shot the man in the head.
    Statia stared goggle-eyed at the scene across the bridge. The hedges were blackened and burning, the very road stained with blood and oil and black, twisted wreckage from the burning tenders. There were no birds singing now. She realised that the wailing man, whether ambusher or Auxie, had stopped his noise – dead now, no doubt, and probably glad of it. The ambush was over: her wish had come true.
    Then a bullet tore a great gouge in the side of the cartnear her face. She saw it happen even before she heard the shot. When she looked she saw the Auxie who’d fired. He was standing in the middle of the river, in almost the same spot where she’d first seen the ambusher only a little while before. The Auxie was still pointing his rifle at her, and she saw several others raise their weapons too. This was not a wild shot, she realised: the man had quite deliberately fired at her. He had meant for her, Statia, to die.
    They’re going to kill me , she thought. They think I was in on it, and they’re going to kill me .
    It was the last straw. Her brain froze. Her stomach clenched. Pure animal fear drove her scrambling across the road and over the ditch. None of the Auxies had reached this bank of the river yet. They were moving carefully, wary of ambushers who might still lie in wait. Statia didn’t move warily at all. She fled pell mell over ditches and stiles, through stands of trees and thorny hedges, down narrow, twisting, half-overgrown lanes between fields. She had no plan beyond putting as much distance as possible between herself and the ambush scene, and even to say that she planned that was wrong: she fled as any other animal might, the last vestiges of her sense cracked by the thought that these frightening men meant to take her life.
    Later she didn’t know how long she’d run for. It might have been five minutes or an hour. She fled through the empty land, falling and getting back up, running and scrabbling and pushing herself on. Sometimes she went on herhands and knees. She couldn’t have stopped if she’d wanted to; and she didn’t want to stop. She wasn’t a child now; in her blank terror she was hardly even human: she was an animal fleeing its death. She could not have fled more desperately if there’d been a devil behind her, snapping at her ankles, keen to tear out her heart and her soul. In the end she stopped when she fell for the twentieth time, and this time couldn’t get up any more. She lay gasping in great shuddering breaths, pain like a hatchet ripping through her ribs and lungs and chest with every breath she took. Then she passed out.
    * * *
    When she woke up she lay looking at the sky, wondering where and who and what she was. It came back to her like a slap in the face, the memories of screams and shots, the burning tenders and the charred hump of the Auxie driver slumped over the steering wheel in the burned-out cab. She lay shivering in her whole body for a time. Then she caught hold of herself and made herself sit up. She was in a field on a green hill, just inside an open wooden gate. She knew at once where she was, recognising it from a fairy rath by the hedge as one of Caffertys’ outlying fields. She was at least three miles from Mulligan’s Drop, nowhere near home.
    She drew her knees up and buried her face in her skirt. The skirt was ripped and tattered from thorns and hedges she’d burst through, not noticing. Her arms and legs were bleeding from a hundred little cuts. She clasped the tornarms around the bruised