The Piper on the Mountain gfaf-5

by Ellis Peters

  “I don’t understand why, either, but I’m sure I’m right. Welland was killed because he was determined to find you, and he looked like succeeding. Tossa and I are marked down because Welland might have told us what he knew. But you’re at the heart of it. There’s something in your past, in your connection with England, that can ruin somebody, and if he can silence you, the urgency’s over. And I brought you and pinned you here for him!”

  “Up to now,” said Alda, “we are still alive. If he knows where we are, let’s see if we can find out where he is. He must be on this side, since he has the doorway neatly covered.” He reached a hand out of shelter to rub away the dust from the window-pane. There was no shot. “The sun probably reflects from the glass, it’s directly on it. So much the better. Come here!”

  Dominic came, slipping along the wall and pressing intently at his shoulder, to peer out at the pale corduroy hillside curving away from them round the side of the bowl, until it reached the talus. He looked down the broken, scoured, almost grassless fall below to the bottom of the basin, and again up from the talus by the bare, polished funnel to where the level of firm rock conducted the path across it. The whole bowl seemed, at first glance, to be void of cover, but when he considered it in more detail there was scattered and meagre cover everywhere.

  “I am supposed,” said Alda serenely in his ear, “to be somewhat of a prodigy at mathematics. Let’s see how precisely I can calculate. I don’t propose to open the door again simply to try and examine the bullet-hole, but I estimate that he was shooting obliquely into the doorway. The angle I should judge to be something like thirty degrees. And he’s certainly on a higher level than we are. The scar makes things easier—at least we can write off the areas where he can’t possibly be.” He was silent for a moment, his eyes roaming the exposed stretch of country intently, his hand on Dominic’s shoulder. “I make him approximately on the level of the rock path up there. Draw a line along from the distant end of it, say twenty yards. Somewhere within ten yards above or below that line, according to my estimate, he should be. You have that area fixed?”

  “Yes.” There were low clumps of bushes there, and some irregularities in the folded ground; it looked a possible hide.

  “Keep it fixed. Watch for the slightest movement there, when I give you the word. I’ll see if I can draw him.”

  It was extraordinary; his voice sounded gay, his step was elastic, there was no doubting his pleasure now. Dominic, faithfully fixing the oblong of ground he had marked down, longed to turn and look at his companion. Maybe it was true that they were all born Janosíks, venturers by instinct, even the artists.

  “A hat wouldn’t be convincing,” mused Alda cheerfully, somewhere behind him. “A shirt-sleeve, perhaps. You’re ready?”

  “I’m ready,” he said huskily, his eyes already aching with concentration.

  The shot made him leap and shrink inside his skin all the more violently because he was waiting for it with so much passion. Alda made a small, echoing sound on the heels of the impact, half hiss, half laugh, drawing in breath through his teeth. And in the low bushes at the very edge of the rock path, that were quivering faintly and constantly in the breeze, there was a sudden tiny convulsion for which the wind was not responsible.

  “He’s there! I’ve got him!” He could turn his head now, and he did, in a frenzy of anxiety, reaching a hand for Alda’s arm as he came slipping back to him. “You’re all right? He didn’t touch you?”

  “I’m all right.” He was laughing to himself, a small, inward rhythm like a cat purring. “Where was he?”

  “Right at the edge of the scar, a yard or so above the path. It’s all still there now, but I’m sure. I saw him move. Only he may not stay there,” he said, his heart contracting ominously. “If we don’t return his fire soon, he’ll know we’re unarmed. If once he gets the idea, he can come down at leisure and get us. We’d have to cross open ground every way if we ran for it.” He had got his companion into this, and he must get him out. “Even if we could kid him we had a gun here,” he said, “we might keep him frozen where he is.”

  And suddenly it occurred to him that they were not totally defenceless. One man with a gun here on the door side of the hut, and the enemy would have to keep cover, and fix his attention upon that danger. There was the window at the back, and a sporting chance of reaching cover from it, and escaping into the valley. That fellow up there couldn’t look everywhere at once.

  He turned his head again and looked at Alda, who was scanning the rifleman’s hide with narrowed, eager eyes.

  “Would you mind terribly if I borrowed your fujara?”

  Alda started, shortened his ardent stare, and looked with amusement and delight at his ally. He was very quick on the uptake.

  “You won’t take in a Slovak that way,” he warned indulgently.

  “No, I know that,” acknowledged Dominic, gazing back at him with eyes wide and steady. “But I haven’t got to—have I?”

  They understood each other perfectly. In some incomprehensible way they had borrowed from each other, and even words had become almost superfluous, so companionably did their minds confer.

  “You know the lie of the land here better than I do. You speak the language, I don’t. And you’re the more essential witness now. I don’t understand why, either, but you are. Let me hold his fire here, and you get out by the window and run for help. I’m awfully sorry,” said Dominic, picking his words as fastidiously as a drunk in his anxiety, “to be cornering the safe job for myself, but it’s quicker and easier this way. If you’ll let me try to use the fujara for camouflage, I shall be safe enough. He won’t dare rush me, if he thinks I have a gun.”

  It was perhaps the most important speech of his life, up to that moment, and he had to get it right. He licked sweat from his lips. All that mattered now was Tossa, safe for a little while in Ondrejov’s care, and safe for ever, even from baseless regrets for that bird-of-prey, her stepfather, once Karol Alda reached Liptovsky Pavol.

  There was a brief and pregnant silence; then Alda said, with a soft ripple of contented laughter: “A good idea! All right, I’ll go. Take the fujara.”

  Dominic didn’t at first recognise the chill that budded so curiously in his heart. It wasn’t fear; he was too excited to be afraid. Fear comes more leisurely and deliberately, and grips the corner of your consciousness that isn’t keyed up to resist it. It was a full minute before he recognised it as disappointment. He had what he’d wanted, but somehow he hadn’t expected to get it so easily, without question. He took the fujara in his hands, the smooth, pale, polished, painted wonder that had to do duty for a gun.

  “Say when you’re ready, and I’ll try to cover you.”

  He heard the harsh sound of a rusty hasp yielding, the creak of the window-frame.

  “When you like. I’m ready.”

  “Good! Now!”

  Dominic opened the door violently, took one rapid step out upon the stone, and on the instant recoiled, stiffening against the jamb. The shot smacked with unnerving aplomb into the opposite door-post; he stared at the hole in dreadful fascination. At least he knew the angle now. If the marksman had been at the opposite end of the rock crossing, Dominic Felse would have been as good as dead.

  Vaguely, at the back of his mind, he heard the soft thud of Alda’s feet on the ground outside the window, and their light, fleet running. This was the most desperate of all the moments left to him. He might have a long siege to withstand, but Karol Alda must get away safely. Dominic skinned off his red sweater, and swung it before him across the threshold.

  Five! Another hole in the timbers of the wall, terrifyingly close, and two holes through his sweater at the shoulder. He leaned against the jamb of the door, and his knees felt like jelly. How many shots could there be in the magazine? And all he was armed with was a fujara; a beautiful, strange, mysterious musical instrument, the antithesis of every known instrument for killing, a whispering pipe that made itself heard over ten miles of co
untry like a melody dreamed rather than heard, and other-worldly even in a dream.

  The running footsteps were quite lost now. He strained his ears, and could hear nothing but the last light sighing of the wind under the eaves of the hut.

  He pushed the door to carefully, leaving only a narrow chink open; and tenderly he raised his long weapon, and slid it forward through the crack, drawing a bead upon the bushes at the end of the rock path.

  After that there was silence. Even the wind had dropped in the height of the afternoon hush.

  He watched the clump of bushes where the enemy lay hidden, and lost count of time. He had no attention to spare for any other spot in all that arena of grass and rock and scree. That was why he failed to see Karol Alda until he lay some twenty yards above and behind the rifleman in the bushes, at the rim of the circle round which Dominic’s feverish attention patrolled steadily and dutifully, all senses at strain. He froze, helpless and appalled.

  So that was why Alda had accepted his role with such deceptive placidity, Alda with his adventurer’s face and his far-sighted eyes, the bandit-artist out of the lawless past, with the old brigand-songs ready on his tongue. He had never had the slightest intention of going for help. He was patiently, calmly, happily circling round above his enemy, unarmed as he was, dropping now into the perimeter of Dominic’s charmed circle, behind the gunman in the bushes.

  And there was nothing, nothing at all, that Dominic could do to help him. Except, perhaps, show himself again outside the door, and that he could hardly do with conviction until the crucial moment. It couldn’t go on being convincing indefinitely, he had to save it as his trump-card. He held his breath, watching. The muzzle of the fujara sagged a little, and he jerked it back guiltily, his heart lurching and recovering in an instant.

  How could he ever have thought that a man like Karol Alda would leave the sticky end to him? He might have known. He should have known.

  The sun was still high, and shadows still short and black. There was only one way of moving in undetected from the south-west, and that was flat to the ground. Alda had a gift for this game, Dominic had to grant him that. He must have made a large circle to reach the place of vantage where he now lay. From the hut he looked as obtrusive as a lizard spread out in the heat on a sunlit wall, though he had rolled up the wide white sleeves of his shirt to his sunburned shoulders; but from where the enemy lay, equally flat to the ground in his thicket of gnarled bushes, Alda would be quite invisible. From here, too, cover looked pitifully thin between them; but he knew to his comfort that there was more of it than there seemed.

  But the one man had a gun, and the other had only his hands, and the odds were crazy. He shouldn’t have done it. He should have made off down the valley to get help, as fast as he could. Dominic gnawed his knuckles and dripped sweat in an agony of helplessness. Even if he propped up the fujara here and made a run for it from the rear window now, he couldn’t possibly reach either the nearest cottage or Alda in time to affect the issue. All he could do was stare until his eyes glazed, and wait for the single decisive moment when he ought to draw the enemy’s fire again. It might all depend on his timing yet.

  Another yard gained. Dominic caught the rapid, smooth movement as Alda flowed through the grass. Fifteen yards now between them, not more, and this afternoon hush over everything, not even a breath of wind to rustle the bushes and cover his advance. Nobody could be so silent as to leave that stillness undisturbed at only a few yards distance. The mystery was how he had got so close without betraying himself.

  The bushes stirred stealthily, up there at the edge of the scar. A streak of brown slid out of cover beneath the silver-green branches, articulated, deliberate, grotesque, a man’s body. The man with the rifle had caught that last movement, and awakened to the near and perilous presence of his stalker. He was leaving his hide, slithering downhill flat on his belly, with the clump of bushes between him and his pursuer, feeling his way backwards to the edge of the rock slide, and cautiously over it.

  Of course! He didn’t know whether his antagonist was armed or not, and he was taking no chances. He wanted rock, not bushes, between himself and Alda. He was easing himself down to a tenable hold, some five feet or so below the edge, where the stray boulders that fringed the broken ground would cover him.

  The distant figure, featureless and anonymous, had turned its back now on the hut below, and paid no attention when Dominic, grasping with a revulsion of horror what was to come, flung the door wide and ran out into the open. He was no longer interested in any target but the unseen enemy in the grass above him, closing in coolly and patiently on the abandoned bushes, and gathering himself now for the final long leap downhill.

  Dominic made a trumpet of his hands and yelled wildly aloft. And at the same moment Alda made his leap, beautifully and vainly gauged to drop him upon the very spot from which the other man had so silently withdrawn.

  The rifle, its barrel a bluish gleam in the sun, was already braced and waiting for him. Dominic saw it flung up to meet the hurtling body, felt the tension of the firing arm like a pain transfixing his own flesh, and set his teeth and held his breath, steeled for the shot. A small, distant, dry, bright sound. The slopes took it up and tossed it among them in innumerable echoes, ripple on ripple, to die in the depths of the valley below.

  The bushes threshed beneath Alda’s falling body, swallowing him from sight. Dominic drew breath in a wail of despair, and stood staring numbly, so sick with his own impotence that he saw what happened next only as an illogical sequence experienced in a dream, and for several seconds could make no sense of it in this disastrous daylight world.

  The man braced on the rough run of the rock chute hung quite still for a long moment. Then slowly his arms sank and spread apart, and the rifle slithered from his hold, and drifted away from him almost languidly, to lodge in a tuft of grass ten feet below, and hang there gently rocking. His outspread hands clutched at the rock and the thinning soil beneath him, and found no purchase, or no strength to maintain their hold. His knees sagged gently under him, and his body began to slide, first with unbelievable slowness, then with gathering momentum, until it struck a projecting knuckle of rock, and was flung abruptly outwards towards the centre of the chute. It struck again, and rebounded, and came spinning and turning and bouncing downwards like a stone.

  In the dwarf bushes above, Karol Alda gathered himself up nimbly, and slid hastily down the few yards to where the rock path began. He reached the edge just in time to see the rag-doll form strike the piled stones of the talus on the ledge below. A sudden convulsion shuddered through the whole laborious erection, running like a ripple from the shock, outward to either end. Particles of stone shifted, toppled, re-settled, and set their new neighbours shuddering in their turn. Then, with a sudden grinding roar, the whole unstable mass burst from its shaky moorings and exploded violently outwards over the valley, spitting rocks like chaff, and hurtled down with the body, in an earth-shaking thunder and a cloud of pallid dust, into the bottom of the bowl.

  Chapter 11

  THE MAN WHO FAILED TO ARRIVE

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  Down from the recesses of the northerly col Ondrejov came bouncing and rolling, that lumpy elderly body of his marvellously deft and rapid in movement, his rifle bumping vigorously at his hip as he ran. Hard on his heels came Miroslav Zachar, still in his leather motor-cycling jacket, and sweating profusely, and two young policemen in uniform. They descended upon the hut, where Dominic stood dazed and appalled, staring down into the cauldron below him, from which a thick, choking smoke of dust rose, and the last muted rumblings of the thunder.

  Ondrejov turned him about by the shoulders, looked him over for damage, and found nothing worse than a scratched cheek.

  “Well for you two,” he bellowed, clouting him boisterously behind in his relief, “that I’ve kept my hand in with a rifle. And well for you I had Mirek on your trail. He was waiting for you below, and you never came. You cost him a fine hunt before he
found the van, and a fine fright I got when he rang up to tell me. If you youngsters would only do as you’re told! I had the road well covered for your sake, but we had to reorganise in a hurry. There’ll be two of us on their way up the valley now, and the rest of us came over the quickest way from Král’s inn. And lucky for you the first shot gave us our bearings. You’re all right?”

  “Yes. Thank you! I’m all right,” said Dominic, still staring down into the boiling eddies of dust below, beneath which the wreckage of the talus still slid and settled with sluggish, sated movements. He thought of a body buffeted and ground and slashed in that titanic disintegration, and the body became live, and his own. He would never play with those things again! He felt sick, but he was alive. For the moment that was all he could feel, and it was enough.

  “Mr. Alda…” he said. His tongue was slow and stupid, and his mouth dry with dust. “Mr. Veselsky, I mean…”

  “Mr. Veselsky is on his way down, look! Like one of his own goats! Does he look damaged? Nie, there was only one shot—mine.”

  Alda was dropping down the grass slope on the far side of the scar in long, sure-footed bounds, balanced like a dancer. They saw that he carried a rifle in his hands.

  “Good!” said Ondrejov. “The gun at least we have, if we can’t have the man.” He laid his arm warmly about Dominic’s shoulders, and turned him towards the descent into the bowl. “Come on, let’s go down. Let’s see what we have there.”

  What they had was a wilderness, a new desolation. They foregathered in silence in the safe, hollowed heart of the bowl, where nothing could fall any farther, and ranged the scattered fringes of a desert of tumbled stones, through a pall of acrid dust that still silted down thickly on every blade of grass between the rocks, until there was no green left. Somewhere under those piled cairns the body of Robert Welland’s murderer was buried.

  “There won’t be much to identify,” said Ondrejov grimly, “but I suppose we shall have to dig him out. We shall need heavy equipment on the job. You didn’t, by any chance, get a proper look at him?”