Page 82 of The Storyteller of Krakow

The fever raged throughout the day. I remember leaving Matthias and going back to camp with Zosia. I remember her asking me how long I had felt unwell for and I said I wasn’t sure, but I thought perhaps I was a little sick the night I went to find Wojtek – I had felt tired, but had put it down to the war, to everything.

Whether it was the long hours, or sitting in a damp cellar, or being around the sick and wounded, I did not know – but something had grabbed hold of me and was now plaguing me, to the point that even the light hurt.

It slipped through the canvas of the medical tent in pale, indifferent strips, and each one felt like a blade across my eyes. My skin burned and shivered at once. Someone had pressed a damp cloth to my forehead in the night. I think it had been Anka.

Zosia had been there at some point, I knew. She whispered that she would check on Matthias and told me to stay as quiet as I could as, in my delirium, I had apparently been saying his name.

By the third day, the fever had broken, leaving me hollow and sweating. I forced myself upright, drank water that tasted faintly of iodine, and left the medical tent to look for Wojtek, or Anka, or anyone. I didn’t want to sit in that bed alone. I needed to move.

The camp felt wrong.

I don’t know what it was – it was just… wrong. Maybe it was still the fever, I thought; maybe I wasn’t quite lucid yet.

I found one of the soldiers, a man called Marekowski, near the supply crates, smoking too fast. I had helped him a few weeks prior when a bullet had nicked his leg. He had made Anka and me bandage it and leave him to go back into battle. He was that kind of man.

‘Have you seen Anka?’ I asked. ‘Or know when she went out last?’

He didn’t answer.

Something in my chest tightened.

‘She’s late,’ he said finally.

‘Late how?’

He flicked ash into the dust. ‘They went up towards the lower ridge. There was shelling again. We lost sight of them.’

‘Lost sight of them?’

He met my eyes then, and I saw it – the thing he was trying not to say.

‘It’s too dangerous to send another vehicle out yet.’

The words rang in my ears.

‘What do you mean, too dangerous?’

‘The road’s exposed. We haven’t got all the high ground yet. It would be suicide.’

Suicide.

‘There were wounded reported near the olive grove,’ he went on, as if explaining something reasonable. ‘They probably took cover. They’ll come back when it’s safe.’

‘Probably?’

He looked away.

I did not remember crossing the camp. I only remember the truck. Mud-caked wheels. A crack in the left headlamp.

I reached for the driver’s door.

A hand caught my arm.

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ Marekowski said.

‘Move.’

‘Lena—’