They stopped the car.
"Hear that?"
Mick shook his head. His hearing hadn't been good since he was an adolescent. Too many rock shows had blown his eardrums to hell.
Judd got out of the car.
The birds were quieter now. The noise he'd heard as they drove came again. It wasn't simply a noise: it was almost a motion in the earth, a roar that seemed seated in the substance of the hills.
Thunder, was it?
No, too rhythmical. It came again, through the soles of the feet -Boom. Mick heard it this time. He leaned out of the car window.
"It's up ahead somewhere. I hear it now." Judd nodded.
Boom.
The earth-thunder sounded again. "What the hell is it?" said Mick. "Whatever it is, I want to see it," Judd got back into the Volkswagen, smiling. "Sounds almost like guns," he said, starting the car. "Big guns."
Through his Russian-made binoculars Vaslav Jelovsek watched the starting-official raise his pistol. He saw the feather of white smoke rise from the barrel, and a second later heard the sound of the shot across the valley. The contest had begun.
He looked up at twin towers of Popolac and Podujevo. Heads in the clouds – well almost. They practically stretched to touch the sky. It was an awesome sight, a breath-stopping, sleep-stabbing sight. Two cities swaying and writhing and preparing to take their first steps towards each other in this ritual battle.
Of the two, Podujevo seemed the less stable. There was a slight hesitation as the city raised its left leg to begin its march. Nothing serious, just a little difficulty in coordinating hip and thigh muscles. A couple of steps and the city would find its rhythm; a couple more and its inhabitants would be moving as one creature, one perfect giant set to match its grace and power against its mirror-image.
The gunshot had sent flurries of birds up from the trees that banked the hidden valley. They rose up in celebration of the great contest, chattering their excitement as they swooped over the stamping-ground.
"Did you hear a shot?" asked Judd.
Mick nodded.
"Military exercises…?" Judd's smile had broadened. He could see the headlines already – exclusive reports of secret maneuvers in the depths of the Yugoslavian countryside. Russian tanks perhaps, tactical exercises being held out of the West's prying sight. With luck, he would be the carrier of this news.
Boom.
Boom.
There were birds in the air. The thunder was louder now.
It did sound like guns.
"It's over the next ridge…" said Judd.
"I don't think we should go any further."
"I have to see."
"I don't. We're not supposed to be here."
"I don't see any signs."
"They'll cart us away; deport us – I don't know – I just think -”
Boom.
"I've got to see."
The words were scarcely out of his mouth when the screaming started.
Podujevo was screaming: a death-cry. Someone buried in the weak flank had died of the strain, and had begun a chain of decay in the system. One man loosed his neighbour and that neighbour loosed his, spreading a cancer of chaos through the body of the city. The coherence of the towering structure deteriorated with terrifying rapidity as the failure of one part of the anatomy put unendurable pressure on the other. "Did you hear that?"
The masterpiece that the good citizens of Podujevo had constructed of their own flesh and blood tottered and then -a dynamited skyscraper, it began to fall.
The broken flank spewed citizens like a slashed artery spitting blood. Then, with a graceful sloth that made the agonies of the citizens all the more horrible, it bowed towards the earth, all its limbs dissembling as it fell. The huge head, that had brushed the clouds so recently, was flung back on its thick neck. Ten thousand mouths spoke a single scream for its vast mouth, a wordless, infinitely pitiable appeal to the sky. A howl of loss, a howl of anticipation, a howl of puzzlement. How, that scream demanded, could the day of days end like this, in a welter of falling bodies?
It was unmistakably human, though almost deafeningly loud. Judd's stomach convulsed. He looked across at Mick, who was as white as a sheet.
Judd stopped the car.
"No," said Mick.
"Listen – for Christ's sake," The din of dying moans, appeals and imprecations flooded the air. It was very close. "We've got to go on now," Mick implored.
Judd shook his head. He was prepared for some military spectacle – all the Russian army massed over the next hill but that noise in his ears was the noise of human flesh – too human for words. It reminded him of his childhood imaginings of Hell; the endless, unspeakable torments his mother had threatened him with if he failed to embrace Christ. It was a terror he'd forgotten for twenty years. But suddenly, here it was again, fresh-faced. Maybe the pit itself gaped just over the next horizon, with his mother standing at its lip, inviting him to taste its punishments. "If you won't drive, I will."
Mick got out of the car and crossed in front of it, glancing up the track as he did so. There was a moment's hesitation, no more than a moment's, when his eyes flickered with disbelief, before he turned towards the windscreen, his face even paler than it had been previously and said: "Jesus Christ…" in a voice that was thick with suppressed nausea.
His lover was still sitting behind the wheel, his head in his hands, trying to blot out memories. "Judd…"
Judd looked up, slowly. Mick was staring at him like a wildman, his face shining with a sudden, icy sweat. Judd looked past him. A few meters ahead the track had mysteriously darkened, as a tide edged towards the car, a thick, deep tide of blood. Judd's reason twisted and turned to make any other sense of the sight than that inevitable conclusion. But there was no saner explanation. It was blood, in unendurable abundance, blood without end -And now, in the breeze, there was the flavour of freshly – opened carcasses: the smell out of the depths of the human body, part sweet, part savoury.
Mick stumbled back to the passenger's side of the VW and fumbled weakly at the handle. The door opened suddenly and he lurched inside, his eyes glazed.
"Back up," he said.
Judd reached for the ignition. The tide of blood was already sloshing against the front wheels. Ahead, the world had been painted red.
"Drive, for fuck's sake, drive!"
Judd was making no attempt to start the car.
"We must look," he said, without conviction, “we have to."
"We don't have to do anything," said Mick, “but get the hell out of here. It's not our business…" "Plane-crash -"
"There's no smoke."
"Those are human voices."
Mick's instinct was to leave well alone. He could read about the tragedy in a newspaper – he could see the pictures tomorrow when they were grey and grainy. Today it was too fresh, too unpredictable -Anything could be at the end of that track, bleeding -”We must -”
Judd started the car, while beside him Mick began to moan quietly. The VW began to edge forward, nosing through the river of blood, its wheels spinning in the queasy, foaming tide.
"No," said Mick, very quietly, “please, no…"
"We must," was Judd's reply. "We must. We must."
Only a few yards away the surviving city of Popolac was recovering from its first convulsions. It stared, with a thousand eyes, at the ruins of its ritual enemy, now spread in a tangle of rope and bodies over the impacted ground, shattered forever. Popolac staggered back from the sight, its vast legs flattening the forest that bounded the stamping-ground, its arms flailing the air. But it kept its balance, even as a common insanity, woken by the horror at its feet, surged through its sinews and curdled its brain. The order went out: the body thrashed and twisted and turned from the grisly carpet of Podujevo, and fled into the hills.
As it headed into oblivion, its towering form passed between the car and the sun, throwing its cold shadow over the bloody road. Mick saw nothing through his tears, and Judd, his eyes na
rrowed against the sight he feared seeing around the next bend, only dimly registered that something had blotted the light for a minute. A cloud, perhaps. A flock of birds.
Had he looked up at that moment, just stolen a glance out towards the north-east, he would have seen Popolac's head, the vast, swarming head of a maddened city, disappearing below his line of vision, as it marched into the hills. He would have known that this territory was beyond his comprehension; and that there was no healing to be done in this corner of Hell. But he didn't see the city, and he and Mick's last turning-point had passed. From now on, like Popolac and its dead twin, they were lost to sanity, and to all hope of life.
They rounded the bend, and the ruins of Podujevo came into sight.
Their domesticated imaginations had never conceived of a sight so unspeakably brutal.
Perhaps in the battlefields of Europe as many corpses had been heaped together: but had so many of them been women and children, locked together with the corpses of men? There had been piles of dead as high, but ever so many so recently abundant with life? There had been cities laid waste as quickly, but ever an entire city lost to the simple dictate of gravity?
It was a sight beyond sickness. In the face of it the mind slowed to a snail's pace, the forces of reason picked over the evidence with meticulous hands, searching for a flaw in it, a place where it could say: This is not happening. This is a dream of death, not death itself.
But reason could find no weakness in the wall. This was true. It was death indeed.
Podujevo had fallen.
Thirty-eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty-five citizens were spread on the ground, or rather flung in ungainly, seeping piles. Those who had not died of the fall, or of suffocation, were dying. There would be no survivors from that city except that bundle of onlookers that had traipsed out of their homes to watch the contest. Those few Podujevians, the crippled, the sick, the ancient few, were now staring, like Mick and Judd, at the carnage, trying not to believe.
Judd was first out of the car. The ground beneath his suedes was sticky with coagulating gore. He surveyed the carnage. There was no wreckage: no sign of a plane crash, no fire, no smell of fuel. Just tens of thousands of fresh bodies, all either naked or dressed in an identical grey serge, men, women and children alike. Some of them, he could see, wore leather harnesses, tightly buckled around their upper chests, and snaking out from these contraptions were lengths of rope, miles and miles of it. The closer he looked, the more he saw of the extraordinary system of knots and lashings that still held the bodies together. For some reason these people had been tied together, side by side. Some were yoked on their neighbours' shoulders, straddling them like boys playing at horseback riding. Others were locked arm in arm, knitted together with threads of rope in a wall of muscle and bone. Yet others were trussed in a ball, with their heads tucked between their knees. All were in some way connected up with their fellows, tied together as though in some insane collective bondage game.
Another shot.
Mick looked up.
Across the field a solitary man, dressed in a drab overcoat, was walking amongst the bodies with a revolver, dispatching the dying. It was a pitifully inadequate act of mercy, but he went on nevertheless, choosing the suffering children first. Emptying the revolver, filling it again, emptying it, filling it, emptying it -Mick let go. He yelled at the top of his voice over the moans of the injured.
"What is this?"
The man looked up from his appalling duty, his face as dead-grey as his coat.
"Uh?" he grunted, frowning at the two interlopers through his thick spectacles.
"What's happened here?" Mick shouted across at him. It felt good to shout, it felt good to sound angry at the man. Maybe he was to blame. It would be a fine thing, just to have someone to blame.
"Tell us -” Mick said. He could hear the tears throbbing in his voice. "Tell us, for God's sake. Explain." Grey-coat shook his head. He didn't understand a word this young idiot was saying. It was English he spoke, but that's all he knew. Mick began to walk towards him, feeling all the time the eyes of the dead on him. Eyes like black, shining gems set in broken faces: eyes looking at him upside down, on heads severed from their seating. Eyes in heads that had solid howls for voices. Eyes in heads beyond howls, beyond breath. Thousands of eyes. He reached Grey-coat, whose gun was almost empty. He had taken off his spectacles and thrown them aside. He too was weeping, little jerks ran through his big, ungainly body.
At Mick's feet, somebody was reaching for him. He didn't want to look, but the hand touched his shoe and he had no choice but to see its owner. A young man, lying like a flesh swastika, every joint smashed. A child lay under him, her bloody legs poking out like two pink sticks.
He wanted the man's revolver, to stop the hand from touching him. Better still he wanted a machine-gun, a flamethrower, anything to wipe the agony away.
As he looked up from the broken body, Mick saw Grey-coat raise the revolver.
"Judd -” he said, but as the word left his lips the muzzle of the revolver was slipped into Grey-coat's mouth and the trigger was pulled.
Grey-coat had saved the last bullet for himself. The back of his head opened like a dropped egg, the shell of his skull flying off. His body went limp and sank to the ground, the revolver still between his lips.
"We must -” began Mick, saying the words to nobody. "We must…"
What was the imperative? In this situation, what must they do?
"We must -”Judd was behind him. "Help -” he said to Mick.
"Yes. We must get help. We must -” "Go."
Go! That was what they must do. On any pretext, for any fragile, cowardly reason, they must go. Get out of the battlefield, get out of the reach of a dying hand with a wound in place of a body.
"We have to tell the authorities. Find a town. Get help -”
"Priests," said Mick. "They need priests."
It was absurd, to think of giving the Last Rites to so many people. It would take an army of priests, a water cannon filled with holy water, a loudspeaker to pronounce the benedictions.
They turned away, together, from the horror, and wrapped their arms around each other, then picked their way through the carnage to the car.
It was occupied.
Vaslav Jelovsek was sitting behind the wheel, and trying to start the Volkswagen. He turned the ignition key once. Twice. Third time the engine caught and the wheels span in the crimson mud as he put her into reverse and backed down the track. Vaslav saw the Englishmen running towards the car, cursing him. There was no help for it – he didn't want to steal the vehicle, but he had work to do. He had been a referee, he had been responsible for the contest, and the safety of the contestants. One of the heroic cities had already fallen. He must do everything in his power to prevent Popolac from following its twin. He must chase Popolac, and reason with it. Talk it down out of its terrors with quiet words and promises. If he failed there would be another disaster the equal of the one in front of him, and his conscience was already broken enough.
Mick was still chasing the VW, shouting at Jelovsek. The thief took no notice, concentrating on maneuvering the car back down the narrow, slippery track. Mick was losing the chase rapidly. The car had begun to pick up speed. Furious, but without the breath to speak his fury, Mick stood in the road, hands on his knees, heaving and sobbing. "Bastard!" said Judd.
Mick looked down the track. Their car had already disappeared.
"Fucker couldn't even drive properly."
"We have… we have… to catch… up…" said Mick through gulps of breath.
"How?"
"On foot…"
"We haven't even got a map… it's in the car."
"Jesus… Christ… Almighty."
They walked down the track together, away from the field.
After a few meters the tide of blood began to peter out. Just a few congealing rivulets dribbled on towards the main road. Mick and Judd followed the bloody tire marks to the junction. r />
The Srbovac road was empty in both directions. The tire marks showed a left turn. "He's gone deeper into the hills," said Judd, staring along the lonely road towards the blue-green distance.
"He's out of his mind!"
"Do we go back the way we came?"
"It'll take us all night on foot."
"We'll hop a lift."
Judd shook his head: his face was slack and his look lost.
"Don't you see, Mick, they all knew this was happening. The people in the farms – they got the hell out while those people went crazy up there. There'll be no cars along this road, I'll lay you anything – except maybe a couple of shit dumb tourists like us – and no tourist would stop for the likes of us."
He was right. They looked like butchers – splattered with blood. Their faces were shining with grease, their eyes maddened.
"We'll have to walk," said Judd, “the way he went."
He pointed along the road. The hills were darker now; the sun had suddenly gone out on their slopes. Mick shrugged. Either way he could see they had a night on the road ahead of them. But he wanted to walk somewhere – anywhere – as long as he put distance between him and the dead.
In Popolac a kind of peace reigned. Instead of a frenzy of panic there was a numbness, a sheep-like acceptance of the world as it was. Locked in their positions, strapped, roped and harnessed to each other in a living system that allowed for no single voice to be louder than any other, nor any back to labour less than its neighbour's, they let an insane consensus replace the tranquil voice of reason. They were convulsed into one mind, one thought, one ambition. They became, in the space of a few moments, the single-minded giant whose image they had so brilliantly re-created. The illusion of petty individuality was swept away in an irresistible tide of collective feeling – not a mob's passion, but a telepathic surge that dissolved the voices of thousands into one irresistible command. And the voice said: Go!