‘We haven’t time to—’
‘Drink it,’ I said. She did as I told her. When she’d finished I threw the bottle away. ‘Now, let’s get to the monastery.’
She led me through the open doorway of the next house. Broken wooden stairs climbed to the floor above. ‘I was at the top of this house when I thought I heard you call,’ she said. We passed the foot of the stairs and along a stone-flagged passage. There was a clatter of hooves behind us. ‘What’s that?’ She turned, her eyes wide and startled. I realised then how near to breaking she was.
‘It’s only George.’
‘Oh — the mule. Why do you call him George?’
We were out of the house now and crossing a dusty patch of garden. Why had the name George come automatically to my mind? My mascot, of course. ‘George was the name of my mascot,’ I said. It had been a little shaggy horse Alice had given me. It had gone all through the Battle of Britain and then flown all over prance and Germany. Some bloody Itye had pinched it just before that last flight.
We were in the next row of houses now. ‘Funny the way he follows us through the house.’ She was talking to keep control of herself.
‘George is used to houses,’ I said. ‘He’s lived all his life in a house, in the same room as the family.’
We were out in the street now, and there was the piazza with the cart leaning drunkenly on its broken wheel. In the instant of recognition I glanced to the left. The lava had moved a long way down the street since I’d last seen it. The twenty-foot wall of black, heat-ridden cinder was not a dozen yards from the main archway of the monastery. I stood there, staring at it, realising that in half an hour the face of it would be about where I was standing and the monastery of St. Francis would have disappeared. ‘Hurry! Please. We must hurry.’
I caught her arm as she turned impatiently towards the main archway. ‘Steady,’ I said. ‘We must decide what we’re going to do. You say you’ve searched the monastery?’