Chapter 428 — The Line Bends IV

Chapter 428: Chapter 428 — The Line Bends IV

Owen came up the connector from the west with two soldiers.

His uniform was black down one side where he had been dragged along the road, and his hands were raw. He was breathing hard. But he was walking.

He heard what the officers at the jeep were saying, and he stopped.

He looked back up the road toward the junction. James saw him look at the petrol station, at the building and the burnt vehicle, at the place where he had pointed out the lane that morning.

He did not say anything about it.

"Ma’am," he said to Farrell. "What happens to the kit at the petrol station? The British boxes. And the wounded, have we got them all? Carey went down the road. But there was a lad from Cronin’s section hit by the houses on the east. I don’t know if he got out."

Farrell looked at him.

"Find out," she said. "Get Dunne and go round every section. I want every wounded man counted before we move. And tell the sergeant at the pumps to rig what he can’t carry, so they can’t use it."

"Ma’am."

He went.

---

The order came at quarter past two.

Farrell’s unit was to withdraw to Rathduff and join the formation forming up there. The aim was to keep the soldiers who were left and stop the British from wiping out a unit cut off at the junction with no way back.

Farrell acknowledged it. Then she turned round to the officers and the Challengers and gave the order.

They left the junction the way they had taken it. They went section by section, one covering the next.

It was not quiet.

The British saw them go and came after them. The infantry got up out of the field. The heavy Challenger came back from the east. Somewhere in the dark, Eleanor Harcourt was moving, though James did not see her.

He was at the back of the centre group as it went down the connector. A section of British infantry came down the road after them with a Challenger in front, a lean man with a short spear. He came round the burnt vehicle at a run, at a group of six Irish soldiers carrying two wounded on stretchers at the back of the column.

James met him at the vehicle.

He drove the spear up and out of the way with Durendal, and put his shoulder into the man and the man went over. James did not stop to finish it. He put his hand out.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,480 / 3,100]`

The blast took the British infantry coming round the vehicle behind the spear-man, and they went flat. James turned and went after the stretchers.

He did not go back.

He did it twice more on the way down the connector, at a bend and at the farmyard. He turned on whatever came close, hit it, and turned back to the column. Not once did he go chasing up the road after anything.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,420 / 3,100]`

It did not stop them leaving the junction. Nothing he could have done would have stopped that.

It meant that everyone who was supposed to be on that road was still on it.

---

Finn was somewhere ahead, at a point where the connector went between two high hedges and narrowed to a single lane. James could hear his voice on the radio. He was keeping the two halves of the column in touch with each other through the narrow part, and telling each section when the one in front of it was clear.

Eamon was behind, on the western side, with Owen and the last of his group. They were bringing out the lad from Cronin’s section who had been hit by the houses. He had not got out after all, until Owen found him lying in a garden.

James heard Eamon on the radio once, his voice tight.

"*Kelleher. We’re out of the chapel. Last ones. We’ve got the lad from the houses. We’re coming down behind you. Slowly. Over.*"

"*How slowly?*" said Farrell.

"*As slowly as a man with one arm carrying another man,*" said Eamon. "*We’ll get there. Over.*"

---

There was a jeep at the bend before the farmyard, an Irish one, hit by something during the night. It was lying half in the ditch, with its back doors open and boxes of equipment still in it.

A soldier stopped beside it.

"Sir. There’s radios in that. And the—"

"Leave it," said the sergeant.

"But we could—"

"There’s British two hundred metres behind us. Leave it. *Move.*"

The soldier looked at the jeep for a second longer. Then he went.

James looked at it too. He could probably have carried two of the boxes. But behind him were the last of the stretchers, and a lad on one of them who kept trying to sit up. A medic kept pushing him down.

He went on.

---

It took them forty minutes to cover two kilometres.

They came into Rathduff a little before three in the morning. It was a farm complex on a crossroads with a big stone yard and good walls, as Farrell had said, and there were other Irish units already there. There were soldiers on the walls with rifles, and a medical post in a barn with lights strung inside it.

Farrell stood at the gate and counted them in. She counted every section and every stretcher, and she asked every officer coming through whether anyone was missing.

James stood on the wall and looked north.

He could not see the junction from there. It was two kilometres away in the dark. But he could see the glow over it, where the building had caught fire at last. And on the road between, small with distance, he could see the lights of vehicles coming down, and the shapes of men walking.

British soldiers were walking into the junction.

They had taken it back, and they had it again.

---

It was not like the evening before.

The evening before, after the junction, there had been a kind of looseness in everybody. Soldiers had lain down on bags of sand and closed their eyes. Somebody had laughed.

Nobody was laughing in the yard at Rathduff. Men sat against the walls where they had stopped. Some of them were asleep sitting up. Some of them had their eyes open and were staring at nothing. There were more wounded in the barn than there were beds, and more coming in. Half the ammunition they had carried up to the junction at midnight was back up the road in British hands, along with the jeep, and the boxes, and the tractor they had borrowed from the farmer.

Farrell was at a table in the corner of the yard with a lamp and a list of names, and an officer from one of the other units standing over her.

Finn found James on the wall.

"The middle," said Finn. "The one at the back. With the waves. Did you get him?"

"I got him away from where he was standing." James looked down at his hands. "Broke his arm. He went behind the trucks. After that he didn’t do anything. The centre held."

"Good." Finn nodded. "We got everyone out of the east. Everyone. We were at the last house and they were coming in the front, and we got them all back through and over the wall. Nobody left behind."

"Good."

Neither of them said *but we lost it anyway*. Neither of them needed to say it. They had both done what they were there to do. It had not been enough to keep the junction.

But it was not nothing.

---

Eamon came through the gate twenty minutes later.

He was walking very carefully. He held his left arm against his body with his right hand. Every time he put his left foot down his face did something, and he did not even try to hide it any more.

James saw it from the wall and came down.

"Can you stand?" said Finn. "Properly?"

"Stand?" said Eamon. "I’ve been standing for nine hours. I’ve stood in worse than this. There was a time on Floor 19 I stood up with—" He tried to straighten his back as he said it, to make the point. He got halfway and stopped, and his face went white, and he put his hand flat on the wall of the barn.

"Right," said James. "That’s it. You’re letting Ruth look at it. Now. Tonight. And you’re not arguing with her."

Eamon opened his mouth.

James looked at him.

Eamon closed his mouth again, and opened it.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah. I probably should."

---

Owen came across the yard as they were turning toward the barn.

"Carey’s in there," he said. "The lad with the leg. From the chapel. He got here."

"Is he going to be all right?" said Eamon.

Owen thought about it.

"I don’t know," he said. "They’re still looking at him. But he was awake when they brought him in. He was asking for his phone."

Eamon breathed out. James watched his shoulders come down.

"Good," said Eamon. "That’s good." He looked at Owen properly. "Are you hurt?"

"No. A bit. Not really." Owen looked at his raw hands. "Just tired."

"Then sit down before you fall down."

"Somebody needs to go through what we left at the petrol station. Make a list. For the—"

"Somebody else can do it."

"Who?"

"Anybody," said Eamon. "Literally anybody in this yard. Dunne. That lad over there. Him. Sit down, Walsh. That’s not me being nice. If you fall over, somebody’s got to carry you, and I’m in no condition."

Owen looked at him for a moment.

Then, slowly, he sat down against the wall of the barn, and closed his eyes.

---

Ruth was in the barn.

She was kneeling beside a stretcher with her sleeves pushed up past the elbow and blood on both forearms. She looked up when they came in, and her eyes went to Eamon, and to the way he was holding his arm.

"Oh, *you have not*."

"It’s not as bad as it—"

"Sit down. On that. Shirt off." She was already stripping her gloves off. "Let me see it."