Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [155]
Ellis appeared. “Stop!” he shouted at Jane, and she realized she was screaming. She closed her mouth with a snap. Ellis knelt down and peered over the edge, still clutching Chantal to his chest beneath his down coat. Jane controlled her hysteria and knelt beside him.
She expected to see the body of the horse embedded in the snow hundreds of feet below. In fact it had landed on a shelf just five or six feet down, and it was lying on its side with its feet sticking out into the void. “It’s still alive!” Jane cried. “Thank God!”
“And our supplies are intact,” said Ellis unsentimentally.
“But how can we get the animal back up here?”
Ellis looked at her and said nothing.
Jane realized they could not possibly get the horse back up onto the path. “But we can’t leave her behind to die in the cold!” Jane said.
“I’m sorry,” said Ellis.
“Oh, God, it’s unbearable.”
Ellis unzipped his down coat and unslung Chantal. Jane took her and put her inside her own coat. “I’ll get the food first,” said Ellis.
He lay flat on his belly along the lip of the ledge and then swung his feet over. Loose snow flurried over the prone horse. Ellis lowered himself slowly, feet searching for the shelf. He touched firm ground, slid his elbows off the ledge and carefully turned around.
Jane watched him, petrified. Between the horse’s rump and the face of the cliff there was not room enough for both of Ellis’s feet side by side: he had to stand, with his feet one behind the other, like a figure in an ancient Egyptian wall painting. He bent at the knees and slowly lowered himself into a crouch; then he reached for the complex web of leather straps holding the canvas bag of emergency rations.
At that moment the horse decided to get up.
It bent its front legs and somehow managed to get them under its fore-quarters; then, with the familiar snakelike wriggle of a horse getting to its feet, it lifted its front end and tried to swing its rear legs back onto the ledge.
It almost succeeded.
Then its back feet slid away, it lost its balance, and its rear end fell sideways. Ellis grabbed the food bag. Inch by inch the horse slipped away, kicking and struggling. Jane was terrified it would injure Ellis. Inexorably the animal slithered over the edge. Ellis jerked at the food bag, no longer trying to save the horse, but hoping to snap the leather straps and hold on to the food. So determined was he that Jane feared he would let the horse pull him over the edge. The animal slid faster, dragging Ellis to the brink. At the last second he let go of the bag with a cry of frustration, and the horse made a noise like a scream and dropped away, tumbling over and over as it fell into the void, taking with it all their food, their medical supplies, their sleeping bag and Chantal’s spare diaper.
Jane burst into tears.
A few moments later Ellis scrambled up onto the ledge beside her. He put his arms around her and knelt there with her for a minute while she cried for the horse and the supplies and her aching legs and her frozen feet. Then he stood, gently helped her up and said: “We mustn’t stop.”
“But how can we go on?” she cried. “We’ve nothing to eat, we can’t boil water, we’ve no sleeping bag, no medicines. . . .”
“We’ve got each other,” he said.
She hugged him tightly when she remembered how near to the edge he had slipped. If we live through this, she thought, and if we escape the Russians and get back to Europe together, I’ll never let him out of my sight, I swear.
“You go first,” he said, disentangling himself from her embrace. “I want to be able to see you.” He gave her a gentle shove, and automatically she began to walk on up the mountain. Slowly her despair crept back. She decided her aim would simply be to carry on walking until she dropped dead. After a while Chantal began to cry. Jane ignored her, and eventually she stopped.