A Whisper of Southern Lights Read Online Free

listening to the sounds of war becoming more and more intermittent. People shouted, buildings burned and collapsed, and once he heard a dozen people calling excitedly in Chinese before a hail of gunfire silenced them.
    And after the victory, the slaughter. He’d been in many wars and was coming to know the pattern. The victors rarely sat back and enjoyed the end of their campaign, because there was still hatred to vent, and revenge, and the freedom of action that the insanity of war inspired. The thousands dead from the fighting would be joined by thousands more from the surrender, and it would be years or decades before these stories were told.
    Gabriel felt distaste at the degradations of humanity, and also at himself for no longer caring. He supposed that, in a way, he was way past human. “You just carry on,” he said. “Fight your fight, kill your prisoners. But don’t kill mine. Because Jack Sykes knows something I need to hear.”
    Gabriel stood, shouldered the rifle and walked out into the street. There was one thing he had to find, and then he would be closer to Jack Sykes. He walked for several minutes, searching in bombed trucks and shattered buildings, avoiding a Japanese patrol by standing still in a shadowed doorway. And he eventually found what he wanted on a man lying dead on top of a stone wall. He seemed to have no visible injuries other than a heavy bruise to the temple. Gabriel rolled him behind the wall and undressed. Dead man’s clothes.

Four
    IN THE END, it was all over even before we reached Singapore. Word came through that we’d surrendered, and an hour later, a cocky little Jap bastard marched down the road, flanked by half a dozen soldiers on both sides. He was carrying a sword. He started shouting, and Sergeant Snelling walked forward warily to meet him. There was an exchange of words, Sarge nodded, and he turned his back on the Jap before saying his final word. I liked that.
    “We’re to march to Singapore,” he said. “Leave all our weapons here. The causeway is fixed and we’re to cross it, and on the other side, there’ll be transport.”
    “Transport where, Sarge?” I asked.
    “To wherever they want to take us.”
    “Fuck this!” someone said. The voice was accompanied by the metallic exclamation of a Bren being cocked.
    “Don’t be so stupid!” Snelling hissed. “You bring down three of them and we’ll be slaughtered. You ever think this was going to be an even fight, laddie?”
    “You want to give in?” the voice asked.
    “Don’t talk down to me, you little shit, or once we’re in whatever place they’re sending us, I’ll come down on you like God with a hangover.”
    I heard no response, but the offending soldier had obviously seen sense.
    Sergeant Snelling walked along the road, telling everyone else the same thing.
    We’re giving in,
I thought.
Davey died for nothing.
    Or maybe not. Maybe the paper buried with Mad Meloy was worth something more than this.
    I shook my head. Weird. Battle shock. I smiled as I dropped my gun and put my hands up, and it would be the last time I smiled for a long, long time.

    They made us line up our seriously injured by the roadside. There were fifteen of them, with wounds ranging from bullets in the leg to major head traumas. Some were conscious, some were not.
    We thought they were being prepared for transport to a hospital.
    Then a hundred Japs emerged from the jungle and walked along the road toward us. They bundled us into three large groups and started us walking, and we all looked back when the first cry came.
    They bayoneted all fifteen of them, one after the other. By the time they reached the last one—a guy from Wales whose name I’d forgotten—he was crying for his mother.

    As I walked, I began to wonder what that piece of paper buried with Mad Meloy might say. Davey reckoned it could change the world. Said he’d seen someone in the jungle with a snake in his eye, and then the jungle had spoken to him and told