Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [150]
As soon as the young man with the rifle was out of sight, Ellis said: “I said you are not to tell people where we are going.”
This time Halam did not pretend incomprehension. “I told him nothing,” he said indignantly.
“You did,” said Ellis emphatically. “From now on you will not speak to other travelers.”
Halam said nothing.
Jane said: “You will not talk to other travelers, do you understand?”
“Yes,” Halam admitted reluctantly.
Ellis felt it was important to shut him up. He could guess why Halam wanted to discuss routes with other people: they might know of factors such as landslides, snowfalls or floods in the mountains that might block one valley and make another approach preferable. He had not really grasped the fact that Ellis and Jane were running away from the Russians. The existence of alternative routes was about the only factor in the fugitives’ favor, for the Russians had to check every possible route. They would be working quite hard to eliminate some of those routes by interrogating people, especially travelers. The less information they could garner that way, the more difficult and lengthy their search would be, and the better the chances Ellis and Jane would evade them.
A little later they met a white-robed mullah with a red-dyed beard, and to Ellis’s frustration Halam immediately opened a conversation with the man in exactly the same way as he had with the previous two travelers.
Ellis hesitated only for a moment. He went up to Halam, grabbed him in a painful double-arm lock and marched him off.
Halam struggled briefly, but soon stopped because it hurt. He called out something, but the mullah simply watched openmouthed, doing nothing. Looking back, Ellis saw that Jane had taken the reins and was following with Maggie.
After a hundred yards or so, Ellis released Halam saying: “If the Russians find me, they will kill me. This is why you must not talk to anyone.”
Halam said nothing but went into a sulk.
After they had walked on awhile, Jane said: “I fear he’ll make us suffer for that.”
“I suppose he will,” said Ellis. “But I had to shut him up somehow.”
“I just think there may have been a better way to handle him.”
Ellis suppressed a spasm of irritation. He wanted to say So why didn’t you do it, smart-ass? but this was not the time to quarrel. Halam passed the next traveler with only the briefest of formal greetings, and Ellis thought: At least my technique was effective.
At first their progress was a lot slower than Ellis had anticipated. The meandering path, the uneven ground, the uphill gradient and the continual diversions meant that by midmorning they had covered only four or five miles as the crow flies, he estimated. Then, however, the way became easier, passing through the woods high above the river.
There was still a village or hamlet every mile or so, but now, instead of ramshackle wooden houses piled up the hillsides like collapsible chairs thrown haphazardly into a heap, there were box-shaped dwellings made of the same stone as the cliffs on whose sides they perched precariously, like seagulls’ nests.
At midday they stopped in a village, and Halam got them invited into a house and given tea. It was a two-story building, the ground floor apparently being a storeroom, just like the medieval English houses Ellis remembered from ninth-grade history lessons. Jane gave the woman of the house a small bottle of pink medicine for her children’s intestinal worms, and in return got pan-baked bread and delicious goat’s-milk cheese. They sat on rugs on the mud floor around the open fire, with the poplar beams and willow laths of the roof visible above them. There was no chimney, so the smoke from the fire drifted up to the rafters and eventually seeped through the