LIONS

Kaspar du Vries stood an inch over six feet tall. At thirty-four, the Major looked ten years older, his thinning dark hair combed back and streaked with grey. Nothing aged a man faster than the reality of war. He'd learned how true that was during the siege of Stalingrad, where he'd lost his hand. The black-gloved prosthetic attached to his right wrist was next to useless. Only good for snapping off a salute.

A shadow passed behind a rambling hedge of elderberry by the side of the road. Tossing away his cigarette, du Vries drew his service pistol.

'If you're trying to hide,' he said calmly, 'you'll need to try harder.'

An odd-looking dog stepped through a narrow gap in the trailing foliage.

'Mijn God,' said du Vries, laughing. 'You're neither one thing nor the other.'

It was - quite possibly - the ugliest dog du Vries had ever seen.

'Where do you come from?' he asked it. 'Are you lost?'

The dog glanced over its shoulder, back toward the walled friary.

Kaspar du Vries smiled. 'I had no idea dogs were so pious.'

The dog didn't growl as such, but made a low rumbling "chuff" deep in its chest.

'It's Pieter, isn't it?' said du Vries. 'I've heard all about you. Where's the boy, eh? Where's Pim?'

The Bridge

German occupied Holland - 1943 / 44

Near the small town of Ahnselm.

On the River Maas.

In the province of Brabant.

The man who called himself Brother Paul made his silent way through the dormitory of Saint Bartholomew's. Two opposing rows of folding canvas cots were butted against the walls of the refectory, minus its dining table and bench seating, rather than the vacated cells of the friars which had fallen into disrepair and were better suited to the spiders, mice, and pigeons that now lived in them.

Too excited to sleep, eleven year old Pim felt a hand squeeze the toes of one foot through his blankets of coarse, grey wool before Brother Paul moved on to wake the others.

There were seven of them. Their names were Muis (Mouse), Lars, Jens, Mattijs, Jakob (Roop), Willem (Pim) and Pieter the dog. They were all under the age of thirteen. Orphans or evacuees. Volunteers. Patriots.

It had been Brother Paul's idea to recruit them for the Dutch Resistance.

Built with bricks of a deep reddish-brown to almost purple colour, the chapel with its adjacent sacristy and bell tower, library, kitchen, refectory, chapter house, cloisters and enclosing walls, the friary was never designed to house more than twenty Dominicans and their Abbe, but with the outbreak of war, and the following invasion, Saint Bart's had become a shelter for the lost, the homeless, and the hungry.

There wasn't an Abbe in residence. The number of Brothers was one. His real name wasn't Paul. And he wasn't a member of any religious order.

Light and dark. Good and evil. The cycle never ended. Vanderbrecht knew this well.

It was a kill or be killed world, where death was as close, and ever-present, as a person's own shadow. That it couldn't always be seen didn't mean it wasn't there. As a boy he’d watched his mother shit herself to death from dysentery. Epidemic in the British internment camps of the Transvaal. But now the British were his allies against the Nazis and their boot lickers in the fascist Volunteer Legion Netherlands.

When Vanderbrecht had first arrived in Ahnselm, it was still possible to catch glimpses of the most wretched of the damned. Those hollowed-out ghosts of men and women, scuttling in the twilight along the narrow streets. But he hadn’t seen anyone wearing the yellow star for at least six months now. They had all been removed, first to the ghettos and then to the camps, where death came not only from disease, or starvation, or a firing squad, but from an open cannister of something called Zyklon-B.

Bas Vanderbrecht had been born in South Africa to Dutch parents. Released from a British internment camp after the second Boer War, Vanderbrecht had mined diamonds in Northern Rhodesia. Managed a tea plantation on the island of Ceylon. Smuggled opium out of China. Fought on the walls of the British Consulate at Peking for the fifty-five days of the Boxer rebellion. Had sailed the Atlantic solo (in a boat he'd built with his own two hands). Rode with the Australian Light Horse to take the Turkish held wells at the battle of Be'er Sheva in Palestine in WW1. And had driven an ambulance for the communist partisans in the Spanish Civil War; where he'd met a brash, bullying American by the name of Ernest Hemingway.

Someone had neglected to tell Brother Paul that a man in his sixties was too old to be running around the countryside in the middle of the night committing acts of sabotage.

Brother Paul had neglected to tell anyone much of anything. He was known to British MI-9 as Fagin. The children who carried out surveillance, gathered information, delivered messages, and risked far more dangerous missions called themselves Bart's Brigade.

With their dirt-smudged faces and their reclaimed clothes, they looked like ordinary children. It was their courage that was extraordinary.

They were lambs who fought like lions.

A boy with fair hair made his slow way through a forest of pine trees toward the railway bridge where it spanned the black ribbon of the Maas, the river lit only by a thin crescent of moon. Pim had been evacuated from Amsterdam. His parents were still there, and - as far as anyone knew - were still alive, though he hadn't had any contact with them for almost a year. His dog Pieter was by his side. Pieter was a medium-sized mutt of uncertain breed. A stray. A mongrel. And Pim's best friend.

Two more boys sat perched like crows on the bridge's wooden trestles. Lars looked up when a hand rested heavily on one of his shoulders and Pim bent down to ask, 'Anything?'

Lars shook his head.

Brother Paul had fallen while securing yet another bundle of dynamite to the bridge's supporting timbers. It was a long way down to the water. There hadn't been any sign of him since.

Lars and Jens were brothers. Always in trouble, but usually clever enough to talk their way out of it.

Pim looked past Jens to where Muis stood, dressed in a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of corduroy trousers, her hair tucked under a cloth cap. The oldest and the only girl, Mouse was nothing at all like her name, and not very much like a girl.

'What do we do now?' Pim said.

Mouse shrugged. 'We go home.'

'To Saint Bart's?'

'It's the closest thing to a home some of us have,' said Mouse.

Mattijs said, 'We should split up. It'll be safer that way. Mouse, Pim, and Pieter. Lars and Jens. Me and Roop.'

Roop was nine. A runaway. He hadn't shared his story with anyone. Mostly because he spoke with a Friesian accent that was thicker than day old oatmeal gone cold in the pot.

Pim asked, 'Where is Roop?'

'Setting the fuses,' said Mattijs. A quiet and serious boy who never smiled.

He checked his watch by its illuminated dial.

'In ten minutes time we're blowing this bridge sky high. Let's move out.'

The Friary

There was nothing like a tank to make people sit up and take notice. The MK IV ground to a halt in the middle of Ahnselm's town square. Kaspar du Vries climbed out of his armoured car and approached the German officer standing in the tank's open cockpit.

Captain Otto Durst acknowledged du Vries with something that might have been a salute and surveyed the quaint little buildings around him.

'This is your nest of vipers?'

'Insurgents,' said du Vries. 'Communists. Traitors. All of them in league with the mad monk and his miniature marauders.'

Durst made a face like a cat's arse. It was typical of the VLN to need real soldiers to do their job for them. 'Leave it with me,' he said. 'We'll have it flattened in a day.'

Mouse, Pim, and Pieter were following the river back to Saint Bart's. It was longer but less arduous than the forested hills, and much less dangerous than using the roads with their troop transports and motorized patrols.

The sun was still rising when Mouse stopped to throw off her clothes and wade into the water. Pim followed, though reluctantly. Pieter had more sense than to brave the early spring chill. They were washing off the accumulated grime of a night spent outdoors when the sound of the first shell exploding carried through the crisp morning air.

Scrambling up the riverbank, Mouse turned and said, 'Do you remember your house in Amsterdam? Could you find it again?'

'Course,' said Pim. 'I'm not a baby.'

'Go,' Mouse told him. 'Take Pieter and go.'

'You'll need my help,' Pim argued.

Mouse yelled at him, 'Go home, Pim! Just go home!'

The orchard at Saint Bartholomew's had rows of pollarded apple trees, their white blossom drifting to where twelve year old Mattijs stood, staring down the wrong end of a VLN soldier's rifle. A second soldier leaned his gun against the base of a tree and reached into the left breast pocket of his uniform. He held out a foil wrapped stick of chewing-gum.

'Here, boy. Take it.'

Mattijs didn't move.

'We make a deal, ja?' The second soldier said. 'You tell us where your friends are hiding.'

'Or what?' Mattijs asked. 'You'll beat me to death with your rifle butts like you did my mother?'

The two soldiers looked at each other. It was all the opportunity Mattijs needed. He pulled a snub-nosed revolver out of the waistband of his shorts, behind his back, and shot them both in the face. He kicked the dead body of the first soldier and spat on the second.

'I only deal in lead,' he said, taking their rifles and ammunition belts, but keeping his .22.

Lars saw the soldier crouched in the shadows of the friary's arched stone gateway. The two boys were lying on their stomachs on the flat roof of the chapel, behind a low brick wall. They were armed with glass bottles full of gasoline, the open necks stuffed with strips of torn rag.

Twelve year old Lars tapped his younger brother Jens on the shoulder and whispered, 'Matches.'

'I don't have them,' said eleven year old Jens. 'You have them.'

'I don't have them,' Lars argued. 'Why would I have them?'

'You had them last,' said Jens.

Lars swore. 'Check your pockets, dammit.'

Jens rolled onto his side to feel the pockets of his shorts. His hand stopped on his right thigh, dipped into the pocket there, and pulled out a thin cardboard packet.

Lars snatched it out of his hand. 'Idiot!'

Tearing out a paper match, he struck it on the brickwork casement, touched the flame to a fuel soaked rag, and hurled one of the bottles overarm.

Jens raised his head above the brickwork to watch the bottle spinning end over end toward its target. The crouching soldier raised his rifle and fired. The first bullet chinked off the low brick wall. The second entered Jen's left eye and blew out the back of his skull.

'Roop, roop, roop,' said Mattijs. 'That's what you sound like.'

Jakob's face flushed scarlet and his hands curled into fists. 'No, I don't!'

'Yeah, you do.'

The youngest and smallest, nine year old Roop hated being teased about his accent, and he was always ready for a fight, even weighed down with twin ammunition belts crossed over his narrow chest and a rifle slung over each shoulder. Mattijs stepped in and rested his forehead against Roop's. The two of them stayed that way, looking into the other's eyes.

'God help me,' breathed Mattijs, 'but I love you, you crazy little bastard.'

Roop grinned.

Mattijs took a step back and turned, waving for Roop to follow him.

'Come on,' he said. 'We have to find the others.'

Mouse climbed over a drystone wall into the friary orchard, last year's windfall spoiling in the long grasses and numerous weeds. It didn't take her long to find the bodies of the two dead soldiers, not far from the cider house, and where Mattijs was, Roop would be. The pair had become inseparable.

Making her way through the rows of apple trees to the gated wall that opened onto the kitchen garden, Mouse could see Lars scrambling down off the chapel roof.

Jens must already be on the ground, she thought. The concussive barrage of tank shells exploding in the nearby town hadn't stopped, great clouds of dust and sulphurous yellow-grey smoke rising into the air. Brother Paul would want them to help the people of Ahnselm. Mouse just didn't know how. She had to find Mattijs. If anybody could get them out of the hell Brother Paul had dragged them into it was God's fallen angel. A virgin boy with lifeless eyes and a stone-cold heart. Mattijs; who was inexpressibly cruel. And so beautiful it was hard to look at him without wanting to cry.

Angry at herself, Mouse swiped at her tears. 'Crying isn't going to help, goddammit!'

Lars was running. Not thinking. Not feeling. Not able to feel. Not yet. He could hear a truck, loud and getting louder, coming closer.

Outside the friary wall, next to the road, was a yew tree, tall with spreading branches. Lars ran to the yew and climbed to a branch the truck would have to pass beneath. He had the machine gun he'd taken off the badly burned body of the dead soldier slung crossways over his shoulder and chest. And in the pocket of his coat was a hand grenade. When the truck, a troop carrier - one soldier driving, another riding shotgun, more in the back under the canvas cover. When the truck was directly under the branch where Lars was sitting, he pulled the pin from the grenade and jumped. He landed on the roof of the cab. There was only time enough to lob the live grenade through the open window of the driver's side door. No time to think. No time to be frightened.

Light. Heat. Sound. Mattijs and Roop had seen Lars fall from the sky. The front cab of the troop carrier disintegrated and burst into flame. The truck veered off the narrow road and rolled onto its side. A soldier was screaming. Another crawled out of the back of the truck and collapsed. There might have been others. They didn't stop to count them.

Mattijs looked at Roop. 'Give me one of those rifles.'

'You stay here.' Mattijs told Roop, pushing the younger boy toward his canvas cot and fussing around him like an old mother hen. 'Get some sleep. I'll go look for Mouse and Pim. They should be back by now. Then we need to go.'

'Go where?' Asked Roop.

'Somewhere that isn't here.' said Mattijs.

'Is Brother Paul really dead?'

'Maybe. I don't know. But we can't wait around to find out.'

'You won't leave me, will you?'

'No,' said Mattijs. 'I would never do that.'

Mouse blocked the stairs leading up to the bell tower, with its view of the chapel roof. 'I told you to go home.'

Pim stared back defiantly. 'You don't tell me what to do.'

'This isn't a game,' said Mouse. 'You could be killed. Don't you understand that?'

Pim tried to push past her. 'Who's up there?'

'Jens.' said Mouse, pushing back. 'He's dead.'

'And Lars?'

'Alive... The last time I saw him.'

Pim said, 'There was an explosion. I heard rifle shots.'

'Mattijs and Roop are here,' said Mouse. 'Somewhere.'

'How did du Vries find us?'

Mouse had her suspicions but didn't voice them. Not everyone hated the Nazis. Hitler had as many admirers as there were those who denounced him.

'What do we do now?' asked Pim.

'We keep fighting,' said Mouse. 'But not here. Ahnselm is gone, and the friary isn't safe any more.'

'Brother Paul might come back.'

Mouse thought about this for a moment. 'I don't want to be here if he does,' she said, but gave no reason.

Pieter began to bark some minutes before Mouse and Pim heard the sound of an armoured car approaching.

Mattijs was sitting comfortably in an upholstered and high-backed chair near one of the two tall windows of the library when Major du Vries stopped in the room's open doorway, with his pistol in his outstretched hand.

Not looking up, Mattijs read from the book in his lap, 'Suddenly from the direction of the water came a sound of violent scuffling, and next instant there broke upon our ears a succession of the most awful roars. There was no mistaking what they came from...'

'Only a lion could make such a noise as that,'* quoted du Vries. 'Are there other lions here?' he asked. 'I see only one such beast. And a small one at that.'

'You don't need to worry about the lion you can see,' said Mattijs, 'but the one you can't.'

As if a bullet from an unseen assassin was the least of his worries, du Vries merely shrugged and asked, 'Where is Fagin?'

'Dead,' said Mattijs. 'He fell in the river and drowned.'

'That is - unfortunate,' said du Vries, stepping further inside the library.

Resting the hand holding his gun on the back a chair opposite, and a twin to, the one Mattijs occupied, du Vries said, 'You must be a slow reader. You've yet to turn a page.'

In answer, Mattijs raised the short barrel of his revolver above the fanned copy of King Solomon's Mines. Just then, du Vries's driver, a pimple-faced corporal, appeared in the doorway, clutching a handful of Roop's collar.

'Ah,' said du Vries, smiling. 'It's our littlest fish. Jakob, isn't it? Tell me, Jakob, where is the man you call Brother Paul?'

Corporal Kirke was the son of a farmer. He had a farmer's hands. When Roop refused to answer du Vries, Kirke gripped the boy's head with both hands and, with a sudden violent twist, he snapped Roop's neck.

In the time it took Roop to fall to the floor, dead, Mattijs had leapt to his feet and had head-shot Kirke, du Vries had shot Mattijs - the bullet shattering his right clavicle and deflecting down at an angle to tear through his left lung - and Mattijs had shot du Vries in the face. Twice. At close range. It happened so quickly, the gun smoke was still rising toward the library ceiling.

It was mid-afternoon and the weather had become unsettled, low cloud and light rain, and the temperature falling by several degrees. With Mouse carrying Roop over her shoulder and Pim helping Mattijs. they exited the library and moved as quickly as they could along the hallway next to the stairs, past the old Abbe's rooms that had also been Brother Paul's, out through the front door and down the steps, to cut across a corner of the cloistered quad into the rectory. Mouse laid Roop down on his folding canvas cot. She put a rifle in his hands, thinking he looked like a small child hugging a favourite toy. Which (she supposed) he was.

Mattijs pushed Pim away. 'I'm alright.'

But then he sat on the floor, with his head between his knees, and coughed up still more blood. He offered no explanations and wanted no sympathy.

'Get out,' Mattijs told them. 'Go before... Soldiers come... No time.'

That he would use the .22 to take his own life after they had gone went unspoken.

Mouse, Pim, and Pieter ran from the rectory, through the kitchen to the door that led to the walled garden, from the walled kitchen garden to the orchard, and from the orchard to the fields and wooded hills that lay beyond it, where they could hide.

Mouse knew people who would help them.

The man who had called himself Brother Paul made his slow way to the dormitory in what had been the dining hall at Saint Bartholomew's. The fire hadn't reached the rectory, both it and the kitchen being in a separate building to the chapter house and library.

He found Roop lying on his cot, curled up and clutching (of all things) a rifle. Sitting on the floor, beside Roop's bed, Mattijs was slumped in a pool of his own blood. He still held the snub-nosed revolver.

Vanderbrecht prised the gun gently out the dead boy's hand. He sat on Mouse's low cot, running his fingers over the blanket of coarse grey wool, remembering how he'd stood over the sleeping child to lift her in his arms, and had then carried her back to the Abbe's private rooms. What he had done to her there was unforgivable.

He checked to see if the gun was loaded.

"And still the man hears all, and only craves."*

Put the barrel of the gun to his temple.

"He may not shame such tender love and stay."*

And squeezed the trigger.

^~

The girl and the boy with fair hair walked the streets of Amsterdam. The boy's dog was by his side.

It was the ugliest dog I had ever seen.

*H. Rider Haggard / King Solomon's Mines

*Robert Browning / Childe Roland