Juggernaut

'Ah, that was very bad. Air Force Intelligence thought that the Second Battalion was already with the Seventh Brigade at Bir Oassa. When they saw troops moving north they thought it was the enemy trying to cut off the Seventh Brigade from corning south. So they attacked.' Sadiq looked anguished.

A mistake! They'd bombed their own men thinking they were the enemy. It wouldn't be the first time that had happened in a war. But they'd bombed them in the middle of a town when they could easily have waited to catch them out in the open. So would somebody eventually apologize for this colossal, tragic mistake? Apologize for the pits full of corpses, the ruined town, the wrecked and tortured people on the rig or hobbling through the wasted country? To Sister Ursula and Dr Kat, to Dr Marriot for the killing of her husband? To Antoine Dufour for the death of his partner?

Somebody ought to say they were sorry. But nobody ever would.

CHAPTER 17

We left Kodowa again.

We went north-west this time, descending from the scrubland to the rainforest country of the lower plains, the same sort of terrain that we'd moved through on our journey northwards. The people in the little villages we passed through came out to see us but they weren't laughing this time. They gazed at the great rig and the strange load it carried and their faces were troubled. Even the children were subdued, catching the uneasiness of their elders.

The rig's passengers varied. Some improved and were allowed to ride in one of the trucks, others collapsed and were given a place on the bedding. Two women gave birth on the rig, and Dr Kat removed a swollen appendix from a ten-year-old boy. The medical supplies dwindled steadily.

At each village Sadiq sent his men out to forage. A couple of beat-up trucks were added to the convoy as well as provisions. Occasionally they found petrol and it was added to our store. Our own food became more basic and the beer had long since run out. But we managed.

In one village we found a small cache of clothing and bartered food for it, and it did feel wonderful to be wearing something clean for a while. The men were beginning to look shaggy as beards sprouted.

With each few hours the make-up of the flock of Nyalans that trailed along after us subtly altered. The convoy was behaving much like a comet in space, picking up and losing bits of its tail as it went along. Groups of Nyalans would arrive at some village where they had kin or were too weary to walk further, and would leave us there. Others would follow along. There may have been several hundred in our wake, and there was something of a ritual, almost mystic, quality in their behaviour. Often one or more would approach the rig and reach up to touch it wonderingly before dropping behind again.

It was Dan Atheridge who explained it to me. He'd lived here for many years, and spoke a little Nyalan. His arm troubled him and he had to be restrained from doing too much; but I knew that he was deliberately driving himself into exhaustion in an attempt to numb the pain and horror of leaving his wife Susie somewhere behind him in the hills beyond Kanja. He had begged to be allowed to go off and try to find her, but had finally been persuaded not to.

I asked him about the Nyalans.

'Your rig's turning into a juggernaut, Neil,' he said.

'That's an Indian thing, isn't it? A sort of God-mobile?'

That got a smile from him. 'You could put it that way. Actually it's one of the names of the god Krishna. It became applied to a huge idol that's dragged through the streets in a town in India annually in his honour. In the olden days sacrificial victims were thrown under it to be crushed to death. A rather bloodthirsty deity, I fear.'

'It isn't inappropriate,' I said. 'Except that nobody's been run down by the rig yet, which God forbid.'

'It's followed in procession by thousands of devotees, who regard it as a sacred symbol of their wellbeing. That's the similarity, Neil. This rig of yours has become a fetish to the Nyalans. You're leading them to the promised land, wherever that is. Out of danger anyway.'

'I hope that's true, Dan. Still, I guess they have to believe in something.'

I mentioned the parallel with the Pied Piper and he smiled again. 'I hope you think of them as children rather than as rats, Neil.'

I got precisely the other viewpoint from Russ Burns some time later that day, when we stopped at last, more than halfway to Makara.

Several of us were waiting for whatever Brad Bishop could offer as an evening meal. Making idle conversation, I mentioned Atheridge's theory about the new role of the rig as a fetish, and Wingstead was fascinated. I could see him formulating an article for some truckers' magazine. Burns' attitude was very different and typical of him.

'More like rats,' he said when I invoked the Pied Piper image. 'Little brown bastards, eating up everything that isn't nailed down. Probably carrying disease too.' I felt a strong desire to hit him. Wingstead got up and walked away.