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24
Jack put his hands on Sally’s shoulders and looked in to her eyes.
“I’m sorry Sally . . . I . . . ”
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
“I’m so sorry Sally, it’s Danny . . . he’s dead.”
Sally seemed to collapse, and then let out an animal howl from somewhere deep within her body.
“How?” she screamed at Jack. “He was fine, he was with me as we came in, I don’t understand.”
“It must have been a stray shot, caught him in the head as he was getting off his horse . . . he wouldn’t have known what had hit him . . . no pain.”
Sally sobbed. A woman from the column came over to them and put her arms around Sally, and hugged her. Then she led her off to where Danny’s body lay. Someone had closed his eyes, and his face was quite peaceful, as if he had fallen asleep. Apart from a trickle of blood from beneath his hair line, he seemed quite unharmed. Sally fell to her knees beside him and picked up his hand, brought it to her mouth and kissed it, and then lent forward and kissed him on the mouth and forehead. They left her alone.
* * *
The skylark continued to sing, but Danny could no longer see it against the blue of the cloudless sky. Then the blue began to whiten and glow and the sound of the skylark was replaced by what seemed like a low humming, and the ringing of a great gong, very deep and low, and the sound of water, tinkling and rippling in a gravelly stream. The white sky brightened and began to form a vortex, and then it became a molten golden circlet against the deepest black velvet. He felt a kind of joyous warmth, a sense of coming home, of intense familiarity and comfort. And there seemed to be voices calling to him from the golden circle, his father and mother, and others from the village whom he had not seen or heard of for so many years. He felt himself being drawn in to the light.
His life was laid out all around him from his earliest memories to the last few days, but all equally intense, equally real. The good and the bad, his mistakes and triumphs, those things he wished he had never done, the things he was once proud of, all the same now, all part of the story, and he began to realise that this must be the end, that his life was over. He felt a pang for Sally but also a great joy because he knew this was waiting for her too, when her time came, and that there was nothing to be afraid of, that he was returning to what . . . ? Heaven? The great ocean of being, this sea of infinite love and compassion out of which the whole world, the cosmos, all matter, all life, all sense, all consciousness had arisen.
There was still that gentle sensation of being drawn into the light, but there was something else now as well – a faint calling, a pull against the tug, something saying, “not yet, not yet”; it wasn’t him, he just wanted to float away down the tunnel to the light . . . but the light grew fainter, and the there was just darkness and a nagging feeling and a voice crying “Danny, Danny” and a great pain somewhere in his head.
He opened his eyes to see Sally’s face, streaming tears, crying and weeping, repeating his name over and over. “It’s all right Sally, it’s all right, I’m all right” he said, or whispered, or thought he said, but then she saw that his eyes were open.
“Oh Danny, Danny, we thought you were dead. Can you speak?”
Danny tried again to say something but his mouth and lips seemed terribly dry and he couldn’t somehow make a sound come out. He heard a voice saying “Give him some water” and then Sally cradled his neck and lifted his head and put the rim of a tin mug to his lips and trickled a little water into his mouth. Danny coughed and spluttered and tried again to speak but only managed a weak groan.
He felt strong arms lift him up on to some sort of stretcher and pick it up. He passed out as they began to move off. The last thing he was aware of was Sally’s hand gripping his.
* * *
For the rest of that day the raiders held off. The block column had cleared a field of fire all around the block out to two hundred metres, and the raiders seemed to have no heavy weapons. Fred had dropped a message to say that the main column with a number of slow moving wagons was making its way along the A14 towards them but would not reach them until sometime the next day. He also said that the battle had been joined south west of Thetford. His aircraft was damaged and he was going to try and land it back at the stronghold.
When the main column of raiders from Needham reached the block there were still two hours of daylight left. They immediately tried a frontal assault but the mortars and machine guns and effective rapid fire from nearly 200 rifles and semi-automatics did terrible damage and they soon fell back.
The raiders were now in a quandary. They could not advance on the stronghold at Newmarket without abandoning their wagons, nor could they go to support their allies at Thetford. In the night they sent two columns out around the block and on towards the stronghold. At dawn they made an attack on the stronghold but they were cut to pieces by the field guns firing canister shells which burst in the air above them spraying hundreds of deadly steel flechettes in all directions. The survivors retreated to rejoin their comrades around the block.
The raiders decided to lay siege. Had they realised how low the block’s stocks of ammunition were they might have kept up their attacks and continued to draw fire, but they reasoned that the block forces were not strong enough to break out and that they would soon be running low on water and food. The truth was that after the battering they had already received their heart was no longer really in the fight.
The battle at Thetford, although hard fought, was going the Pale’s way. At first the raiders seemed determined and brave enough but as the fight continued into a second day, each fresh attack seemed to have fewer and fewer men and horses. Late on the second day a large group appeared behind the Pale’s line, carrying several white flags. They came in to talk to the commanders and said they had killed their leaders and wanted to surrender. Soon afterwards the main Pale column advanced to Thetford and found the wagons abandoned and only the bodies of the dead left behind. The column immediately swung south to relieve the block on the A14. As soon as they realised what had happened at Thetford the remaining raider columns lifted their siege of the block and moved off to the south and east.
* * *
Two months later, the raiders at March sent a delegation under a flag of truce to the force commander at Ely. They said they also had killed their commanders and wished to surrender as a body. It later turned out that they had not in fact killed their leaders, but it seemed sensible to those leaders who remained alive to pretend that they were simply foot soldiers.
Of those who surrendered, most were sent to work on farms. Some were recruited into the standing force that was now moving throughout East Anglia outside the Pale, tracking down stragglers and pursuing bandits. But many escaped far to the west, south and north, out of reach of the Pale forces
* * *
When the block was relieved and the Thetford force had chased away the last of the raiders’ columns, Johnny took Sally and Danny back to Cambridge. Six weeks later Sally realised she had missed two periods. She was pregnant with Danny’s child.
Frank Chisholm Stearman was born on January 6th, 2054.