countless small holes. Their interiors were laid bare, windows shattered, roofs crushed, engines exposed. The bodies inside were almost unrecognisable as having once been human. Not a single piece of them was untouched by a ball bearing or the blast itself. Some body parts were identifiable - a foot, a hand, a boneless face lying flat on the ground. The rear door of the Mercedes hung open on one hinge and a large piece of flesh, the remains of a man but without any limbs or head attached, lay across the back seat, flopping out onto the road. Only DNA analysis could prove that it was Chemora, but Louisa had seen him. He had been in the Mercedes, and nothing in the car could have survived.
The smoke irritated Stratton’s throat and he jumped down and backed away. He slid down the embankment and crossed the river, heading for the rise, his thoughts now on Louisa.
She had not moved and sat near the crest staring at the bridge, unaware of him, a gentle breeze playing through her long hair.
‘You okay?’ he asked as he came up to her.
Louisa glanced at him and nodded. ‘You did it.’
‘We,’ he corrected.
‘Tell me something. And please be straight with me.’
‘I’ve never been anything but.’
‘When did you decide that I would be the one to blow the bridge?’
She was distant. It was only to be expected. ‘It just worked out that way.’
‘As long as you didn’t do it.’
‘I always hoped to avoid that, but I would’ve, if I’d had to.’
‘That’s right. You came here just to teach . . . We owe you an apology, don’t we? We abused you.’
‘Maybe Victor was right. This is everybody’s fight.’
As Louisa watched the peasants gathering together, the women clutching their children, tears formed in her eyes, spilling forth to roll down her face. ‘Why does it have to be like this?’ she asked softly.
‘We’re still growing up.’
‘We’ll always be like this.There’ll always be those willing to destroy in order to get what they don’t deserve.’
‘I don’t agree. I can’t agree. Otherwise what would be the point in fighting them? I’d just look for a place on this earth to wait out my life. We’ll win in the end. Some day.’
Louisa did not look convinced and she got to her feet. ‘What shall we do with them?’ she asked, looking at the peasants.
‘What do you want to do with them?’
She got his point. ‘We’ll take them back with us.’
‘What about the soldiers?’
Victor and Bernard were stripping them of any weaponry, while Kebowa and Mohesiwa kept them covered with their drawn-back arrows.
‘We’ll let them go,’ she said. ‘They can tell the story of what a handful of revolutionaries can do.’
Stratton began to walk away down the rise.
‘Legend will, of course, include a shadowy Englishman. But no one will really know who he was and why he came here. He was called The Mercenary, but that couldn’t have been true. He took no payment for his work. And then he left as mysteriously as he arrived.’
Stratton continued walking.
Louisa watched him go.
The rebels were strangely quiet on the homeward journey. Even Victor did not say much. But they were not really subdued, not in their hearts. What had happened at the bridge had simply made them more serious. In part they could not believe what they had done or, indeed, that they had all survived - and with hardly a scratch, at that. What was more, they had saved a dozen souls. As Victor had said, it was the stuff of legend.
He believed Neravista would be so shocked by the death of his brother that it could take him weeks to react. That was not due to any emotional debilitation, he was quick to point out. The man was incapable of such a thing, even when it came to his own family. Neravista would have been knocked back by the sheer audacity and fury of the assault.
Those adult peasants unfit to walk rode on the horses and burros with the children. The group travelled during the daytime and rested at night even though there was a possibility that government troops would be mobilised to find them. Stratton decided that the risks of serious injury to the women and children moving at night were far greater. By late afternoon of the third day they reached the plateau and the familiar approaches to their encampment.
Louisa had not given the reunion with her father much thought. But the smell of the campfires seemed to revive the