“That’s a good idea,” said Tom. He turned back and peered again through the branches and then stiffened. He said softly, without turning around, “You’d better start making them now.”
They scrambled cautiously to their feet and looked for gaps in the thicket to try and catch a glimpse of the Wiggs fence. With twigs pricking against his face, Derek saw the figures moving around the broken section of the fence that was the camp’s roof; one boy was crawling inside, handing out something to another; three or four others were scuffling in the grass, and a taller boy that could only be Johnny Wiggs, the elder brother, was leaning against the fence watching them.
“Come on,” Peter hissed urgently, and then bent and began shaping handfuls of the clay from the great orange heap into rough finger-marked balls and laying them in rows along the near edge of the heap. Once they had begun the familiar process, they fell easily into a quick, practiced series of movements; scoop up a handful of mud, cup it in your hand, cup the other hand over the top and squeeze, so that a little brown water trickled through the fingers, give the ball a half-turn, and squeeze again to make sure it would keep its shape, at least for as long as would be necessary. And then put it down and begin again.
“Are they really going to come out, Tommy?” Geoff said.
“Can’t tell. I think they are.” Tom moved across to the thin edge of the thicket and began gently, quietly, breaking down layers of the slender branches so that there would be only a last fragile border of cover to break through when the moment came to launch their attack. Derek heard the blood thumping in his ears with anticipation and nervousness, and tried to bury his excitement in the work of making ammunition.
“You seem to make them quickest, Derry.” Tom was looking back at them briefly again. “You keep on for a bit when the rest of us start to throw. Then you take over, Geoff, and then Pete. Or two of you at once if we seem to be running out. You’ll have to keep an eye on how much we use.” He looked back and waved an arm at them behind his back. “Stop for a minute, stay quiet. They’re coming.”
The sun was shining properly now, dappling the dark hollow of the thicket with patterns of light through the leaves; the field was very quiet, but they could hear the voices of the Wiggs gang calling indistinctly to one another. They crouched there, mute. The voices grew louder, nearer. They heard one shout, louder than the rest, “Aw come on, Johnny, just for a bit.” Derek was squatting behind the mud pile, one knee sunk in the wet clay where he had been leaning over to drop mud-balls scooped from the top into the pile on the other side. He could see nothing outside from there, but in front of him he saw Pete bob suddenly in excited delight and knew that the enemy must all be within range, exposed out there in the middle of the empty field.
Without turning, Tom shot out one arm and grabbed Geoffrey and put him in position at his side; then waved at Peter to make a third in line. Derek woke suddenly out of paralysis and began frenziedly making more mud-balls and dropping them down onto the pile, rather resenting his dull job behind the lines. After all, he could throw farther and harder than Geoff. But there was no time for thinking. Tom suddenly let out a great whoop and crashed trampling through the last few saplings, with Geoff and Pete at his side prancing and yelling, each with an armful of mud-balls clutched between crooked forearm and dirty shirt, and the battle was on.
Derek paused long enough to see the thicket break in half as the three figures trod and jumped a great gap through the middle; long enough to see arms jerk back and throw, and at least two White Road boys out in the middle of the field stumble and spin as a splattering handful of mud hit them on their chest or back. Then he worked away at the making, and before his face the hands of Tom and Pete and Geoffrey came down and back and down and back snatching up more ammunition for the battle. He thought: “Someone’s throwing straight, anyway. Tom, and Pete; and maybe even Geoff’s doing all right.” He could hear voices yelling in confusion, curses and angry roars from the field, and shrieks of delight from above his head. And then suddenly it was too much for him; he wanted to be part of it. There was still a good-sized heap of mud-balls waiting after all; and he snatched up an armful and yelled, “Someone else’s turn,” and jumped forward to stand between Tom and Pete and send his own ammunition flying out at the running figures in the field.
Nobody else did take a turn; there was no time and no need. The boys from the White Road were scattering away from the thicket; two of them back to their camp, the rest in the opposite direction, to the far side of the field. Derek hurled his mud-balls; nothing could have stopped him from throwing all he had. Only one of them found a mark, and that only on the ankle of one flying form. Still, the sight even of that small brown splash of mud was a satisfaction.
They stopped throwing. All the targets were out of range. Across the field beside the crooked old trees of the disused orchard, the escaped enemy drew together in a little group around the taller figure of Johnny Wiggs. The two boys cut off on the other side were no longer visible, but presumably sheltering inside their camp.
“Those two,” Tom said, squatting down but keeping a wary eye on the far group. “We’ll have to watch out for them. They might try going back through their garden to the road and coming into the field behind us.”
“They couldn’t,” Geoff said. “They wouldn’t go through your house, and the gate to the field’s all padlocked and wired, because of the anti-aircraft camp.”
“They might all the same.”
“What are the rest doing over there?” Peter peered across at the main group.
Tom grinned. “Trying to wipe off some of the mud, I expect.”
“What happens next?” said Derek.
There was a pause, and they looked out at the knot of distant figures and then back at Tom. In all their enthusiastic discussion of plans for the ambush, it had not occurred to them that the battle would have a second stage. Their imagining had begun and ended with the throwing of their mud-balls and the discomfiture of the unsuspecting enemy. They had never thought beyond that. The ambush was to be their great action, the wreaking of vengeance for the shattered camp and the killed cat. Now that it was over, what were they to do next?
Geoffrey was still watching the group across the field. “They’ve split up,” he said. “Two of them have gone off into the trees.”
Peter said, carefully casual, “I suppose they’re planning a counterattack.”
Derek swallowed and said the thing that he knew they were all thinking but that it seemed shameful to say aloud. “Tom? Do we call it quits and go back to your garden now, or do we stay here and wait to see what they do?”
The others looked at him, and he looked at them, and while his last words were still in his ears, he said the other thing he knew they were feeling as well.
“Seems awfully soft, really, just to go back. Almost like running away.”
That was it, they knew. If the White Road gang had run from the ambush back to their own camp and disappeared into its safe shelter, that would have been one thing. Left victorious, they could have retired: holders of the field, avengers of the original sneak attack. But the White Road gang hadn’t disappeared; they were still out there in the field, muddy and glaring, and obviously planning an attack of a different kind. If the ambushers were to leave the stage now, they would not be retiring in victory; they would be beating a retreat.
That wouldn’t do at all.
Tom said softly, contentedly, almost crooning, “They’ll be back. We’ve only just begun.”
Peter and Derek and Geoffrey looked at him, but not at one another. They were trying to grasp the shift in roles. Before, they had been in the position of advantage: the ambushers, with surprise and shelter on their side. Now they were about to become the besieged. They would still have the shelter of the thicket, but unless they were watchful and lucky, the advantage of surprise would belong now to the other side. It was beginning to seem unlikely that they would come out of this next encounter unscathed.
Derek thought: “It’s really just the same as if we’d challenged them in the first place.”
Peter took a deep breath. “If they’re going to come after us, we’d better have a lot more ammunition ready.”
“Too true,” Tom said.
He stood keeping watch on the field, and they worked away steadily at the dwindling heap of clay. Neat rows and mounds of mud-balls rose all around it until they were higher than the clay that remained.
Tom glanced back. “That’ll do,” he said. “Keep watch instead. They’ve all split up now and gone under cover. You come over here, Pete, level with me, and you two over there with your backs to us. Then we’ll be watching the whole field. If you spot anyone, yell, and open fire if they’re in range. And whoever’s nearest can help. But the other two will have to stay keeping watch, because they’re bound to attack from at least two places at once.”
They squatted there in the thicket, four corners of an outward-facing square, and waited. The field seemed quite empty and very peaceful. Though they could feel only a gentle breeze stirring the branches of the hawthorns now and again, the clouds above were scudding along at a great pace: ragged, misty-edged gray clouds from the mass that had brought the rain of the night before. In the silence below the sky, Derek listened so hard that he felt his ears should be pricked high and alert like a dog’s; but he could hear nothing except the quarreling of starlings in some distant tree.
He stared out at the field, moving his eyes to and fro across his allotted segment of horizon and back again, but he still could see nothing except the new grass and the scattered bushes and trees and, away beyond them, the barbed-wire fence of the anti-aircraft camp.
Without moving his gaze he said softly to Geoff, close beside him and watching another quarter of the compass, “What d’you think they’ll do?”
“Dunno. Rush us, I suppose. Try to jump on us quick and give us a bashing.” There was a moment’s pause, and he added, without much hope, “Or they might just have gone away and gone home.”
Derek said gloomily, “Fat chance.”
They waited and watched. Behind them in the thicket Derek could hear a rustle of voices as Tom and Peter talked, but he could not distinguish the words.
Beside him Geoffrey said quietly, so quietly that he could barely hear him, either, “Derry? I don’t like this much.”
The naked honesty of it was something not often heard from someone like Geoff, and for that moment Derek liked him more than he had ever liked him before. He said truthfully, “Neither do I.”
Suddenly there was a shout behind them, splitting the day into splinters, a cry of “There they go! Look there!” and a scuffle of rapid movement. Derek swung around and saw Tom halfway to his feet and Peter dancing uncontrollably up and down and hurling mud-balls toward the camp in the Wiggs boys’ back fence. Beyond, and quite close to the thicket, two figures were weaving and ducking and trying unsuccessfully to run on through the defensive barrage of splattering handfuls of mud. He swung his gaze guiltily back to his own ward as Tom joined in the throwing, and he realized how vulnerable every other direction had become.
It was almost too late. In the instant that he turned back, he heard Geoff hiss, “What’s that?”
Wildly he stared out at the field and caught sight first of one flicker of movement and then another, and then a third; all in line and all horribly near, not more than twenty yards away. The Wiggs boy and their gang must have been stalking them, slowly and carefully, all this while, spread out in line across this part of the field so that no more than one head at any point was using the scanty clumps of scrub for cover. He knew that it would be disastrous to let them get even one step closer.
“Quick!” he said hoarsely, and swung around, waving at Geoff to do the same, and grabbed up an armful of mud-balls so large that he could scarcely hold them. And then he was up on his feet, whooping and yelling as Peter had done, and hurling ammunition—not too fast, not too fast, don’t waste it—out at the places where they had seen the heads move.
In an instant Geoffrey was throwing, too, and their speed worked. At the sound of the shouting, the besiegers assumed they had all been seen, and they scrambled up out of their cover and ran headlong into the barrage.
“Tom!” Derek shrieked, and went on throwing. There were five of them coming, running, ducking and dodging, and the middle figure of the five and the first to have risen to his feet was big Johnny Wiggs, hurtling toward them and looking twice as big as Tom and as menacing as a runaway tank. Instinctively Derek used him as a target, and one mud-ball—he never knew whether it was his own or Geoff’s—caught Johnny Wiggs on the side of the chin and sent him staggering comically backward with splashes of mud all over his face and shirt. The other boys, smaller, two of them smaller even than Derek and Geoff, paused as they glimpsed his stumbling and looked first at him and then ahead at the thicket. The pause was enough for Derek and Geoffrey, and now Peter joining them as well, to take better aim and send them, too, ducking to the ground. So the first charge had been stopped, even though the chargers were nearer now than they had been before.
But not for long; for not more than the few seconds in which Peter and Derek and Geoffrey took breath and grinned at one another in excitement and triumph. Johnny Wiggs scrambled to his feet, and with him his followers, and though the barrage from the thicket began hastily again, there is only so much that a few thrown mud-balls can do to stop five charging boys, especially when only three boys are doing the throwing. Tom was still busy behind them in the thicket, trying to keep off the first two attackers, who were coming again now, with wary arms crooked over their charging heads so that even the most accurate mud-ball could do very little to stop them at all.
Still, as Derek happily noticed in the moment before battle broke loose, they were all very muddy indeed.
Then the charge hit the thicket, and the besiegers were on top of the ambushers, and Derek was rolling on the ground twisting wildly to keep off the flailing form of David Wiggs, barely recognizable through the great orange smear of clay across one side of his face. Dimly through the confusion he was aware that two largish boys were trying to pin Pete to the ground, and two smaller ones thumping at a wriggling Geoff, and that big Johnny Wiggs was standing in the midst of it all glaring down at them with both his fists clenched. Then David Wiggs’s elbow poked Derek in the eye, and the pain of it was so sudden and infuriating that he gave a great jerk upward and in a wrathful instant found himself sitting on David Wiggs’s chest, bringing his knees forward to pin the flapping elbows down.
David Wiggs said furiously and indistinctly, “Get off!” and brought his legs up to kick at Derek’s back; but it was another pair of hands that pulled Derek off, as one of the boys attacking Pete left off to come to the rescue. And then the whole thrashing grunting confusion began again, and all of it far nastier than any fight Derek and Peter and Geoff had ever had among themselves, because each of the members of this battle was very angry and wrought-up, and each of them had a grievance that he was remembering with every twist and punch. It was not a very clear remembering, but the grievance was nonetheless there. If Derek had ever been excited enough to enjoy it at the beginning, he was not enjoying it a very few seconds after it had begun, and even less when it had been going on its scrambling, battering way for longer than that.
Somebody sat down hard on his legs, to join the somebody else who seemed to be sitting on his shoulders, and he grunted into the grass. All around it was now a remarkably silent fight, lacking any of the war whoops and yells with which it had begun. They all seemed to be scrambling around and puffing and blowing without saying anything very much.
But he heard himself say something then, or rather shout in wordless pain, as the boy who had sat on his legs grabbed hold of one of his feet and twisted it hard so that it really hurt. And then Pete was there, shoving aside one assailant and punching angrily at the other.
“Get up, Derry, quick!”
He wriggled up and out, b
ut there was no getting away because the two of them were at Pete now; so then in a moment the four bodies, Peter and he and the two White Road boys, with another hovering, were twisting and wrestling to and fro on the damp spring grass, and writhing away from the hawthorn branches that reached out to scratch at their skin.
And so it might perhaps have gone on indefinitely, in a long, endless grubby confusion, if one or two or all of them had not glanced up out of their wrestling and seen Tom.
Derek only knew that somehow they all fell away from one another as if there had been a signal, and lay there panting and looking across at the wide clear patch of grass beside the thicket. He saw Geoff propped up on his elbows watching, too, and David Wiggs raising his head where he lay beside him, and two other White Road boys standing close by loose-armed and still. And over in the open space, Tommy Hicks was standing facing Johnny Wiggs, the two of them alone.
They were both slightly crouched, with arms crooked and ready, like wrestlers waiting to spring. They were both disheveled and panting and spattered with clay, and there was no knowing whether all this came from the general rough-and-tumble or whether they had already been fighting there alone, the two of them. But that wasn’t it, Derek thought, watching them. This was something about to happen. This was the bomb about to go off. His shoulders twitched in a sudden involuntary shiver, and he felt a prickling in his neck. But he could not keep his eyes off the wire-taut figures of the two big boys. None of them could. Wherever they stood or sat or lay, they were paralyzed into an audience, frozen in expectation and a kind of fear.
And then the bomb did go off. Johnny Wiggs lunged sideways at Tom and brought his back fist swinging forward, and Tom dodged so that the fist hit his arm, and dived with the same arm stretched out and pulled Johnny Wiggs off balance and down to the ground, where they rolled over and over in a horrible, furious confusion of flailing arms and kicking legs. Then somehow they were up again, weaving silently about in the same ominous pause as before. And then the heads came down and the arms swung, and Derek winced as he heard a muffled thump from Johnny Wiggs’s fist connecting with part of Tom, and he ducked his head and shook it and felt sick. The fight went on, and they sat mesmerized, and as it went on, it grew worse and more bitter and malevolent, and Derek knew that each of the watching boys, both friend and enemy, felt as he did himself: caught up in a great unmanageable fear at the sight and sound of a fighting that was not like their own kind of fighting at all, but something much older and bigger and with emotions behind it of a kind they did not know. These two big boys were engaged in something that made him suddenly feel very small. He could hardly bear to look at their faces, each now and then visible for a flaring second out of the whirl of angry limbs or the wary, watchful circling that punctuated the scuffling bursts. The look on these faces was not a look he had ever seen on the face of any boy he had ever fought. He had glimpsed, often enough, plain anger and the vengeful concentration of wanting to hurt, but he had never seen this. This was something different. Tom Hicks and Johnny Wiggs these two still were, but their faces had changed utterly; they were twisted up in some vast adult emotion as if they were fighting some fight that was not about themselves only, but about far bigger things. There was the sneer of real hatred on the faces. He had never seen hating before. He remembered Pete saying that the two had often fought, but even so, this looked like more than a kind of climax to years of enmity; almost as if the whole world had suddenly divided into two and the two halves were here flinging themselves one against the other.