Then, the horse tied again, she with the saddle up now, the blanket smoothed, hauling tight on the cinch she heard the big, deep voice from the timber below, “Maria! Maria! Thy Inglés is all right. Hear me? All right. Sin Novedad!”
Maria held the saddle with both hands and pressed her cropped head hard against it and cried. She heard the deep voice shouting again and she turned from the saddle and shouted, choking, “Yes! Thank you!” Then, choking again, “Thank you! Thank you very much!”
When they heard the planes they all looked up and the planes were coming from Segovia very high in the sky, silvery in the high sky, their drumming rising over all the other sounds.
“Those!” Pilar said. “There has only lacked those!”
Robert Jordan put his arm on her shoulders as he watched them. “Nay, woman,” he said. “Those do not come for us. Those have no time for us. Calm thyself.”
“I hate them.”
“Me too. But now I must go to Agustín.”
He circled the hillside through the pines and all the time there was the throbbing, drumming of the planes and across the shattered bridge on the road below, around the bend of the road there was the intermittent hammering fire of a heavy machine gun.
Robert Jordan dropped down to where Agustín lay in the clump of scrub pines behind the automatic rifle and more planes were coming all the time.
“What passes below?” Agustín said. “What is Pablo doing? Doesn’t he know the bridge is gone?”
“Maybe he can’t leave.”
“Then let us leave. The hell with him.”
“He will come now if he is able,” Robert Jordan said. “We should see him now.”
“I have not heard him,” Agustín said. “Not for five minutes. No. There! Listen! There he is. That’s him.”
There was a burst of the spot-spot-spotting fire of the cavalry submachine gun, then another, then another.
“That’s the bastard,” Robert Jordan said.
He watched still more planes coming over in the high cloudless blue sky and he watched Agustín’s face as he looked up at them. Then he looked down at the shattered bridge and across to the stretch of road which still was clear. He coughed and spat and listened to the heavy machine gun hammer again below the bend. It sounded to be in the same place that it was before.
“And what’s that?” Agustín asked. “What the unnameable is that?”
“It has been going since before I blew the bridge,” Robert Jordan said. He looked down at the bridge now and he could see the stream through the torn gap where the center had fallen, hanging like a bent steel apron. He heard the first of the planes that had gone over now bombing up above at the pass and more were still coming. The noise of their motors filled all the high sky and looking up he saw their pursuit, minute and tiny, circling and wheeling high above them.
“I don’t think they ever crossed the lines the other morning,” Primitivo said. “They must have swung off to the west and then come back. They could not be making an attack if they had seen these.”
“Most of these are new,” Robert Jordan said.
He had the feeling of something that had started normally and had then brought great, outsized, giant repercussions. It was as though you had thrown a stone and the stone made a ripple and the ripple returned roaring and toppling as a tidal wave. Or as though you shouted and the echo came back in rolls and peals of thunder, and the thunder was deadly. Or as though you struck one man and he fell and as far as you could see other men rose up all armed and armored. He was glad he was not with Golz up at the pass.
Lying there, by Agustín, watching the planes going over, listening for firing behind him, watching the road below where he knew he would see something but not what it would be, he still felt numb with the surprise that he had not been killed at the bridge. He had accepted being killed so completely that all of this now seemed unreal. Shake out of that, he said to himself. Get rid of that. There is much, much, much to be done today. But it would not leave him and he felt, consciously, all of this becoming like a dream.
“You swallowed too much of that smoke,” he told himself. But he knew it was not that. He could feel, solidly, how unreal it all was through the absolute reality and he looked down at the bridge and then back to the sentry lying on the road, to where Anselmo lay, to Fernando against the bank and back up the smooth, brown road to the stalled truck and still it was unreal.