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crowd of people, walking Chica down to the river for a drink, when I saw a girl standing in front of me, gaping at me wide-eyed. Maria! It was Maria! How long we clung to each other and cried together I do not know.
    “And Mother? Father?” I asked her, but she shook her head and walked me to the river. There, on the river bank, as Chica drank her fill, she told me whathad happened – how, when I couldn’t be found that morning, she’d been sent out to find me, how the planes had come, and the house had been hit. She’d run back but there was nothing she could do. The house was ablaze. She couldn’t get near it. She had looked for me everywhere, called for me, and the pigs and the goats and the chickens were running everywhere in a wild panic, and all the time the planes were bombing and strafing. All she could think of was getting away. So she ran and ran. She’d wandered the woods for days before meeting a charcoal burner, who had fed her and cared for her, and brought her here to hide up in the hills with all the others. They’d been here for weeks and weeks, she said, but there was very little food to go round and they were allterrified that the
Guardia Civil
might come.
    “You won’t have to worry about that any more,” I told her, “because Uncle Juan is here with his soldiers, and they’ll look after us.”
    “Uncle Juan is here!” she cried; and then she saw him and went running to him, throwing herself into his arms.
    The three of us, Uncle Juan with an arm around each of us, sat together that night and we talked under the stars. After a while we fell silent, each of us wrapped in our own thoughts. That was the moment Maria asked me the question I’d been dreading. “You never told me, Antonito. Where were you when the planes came? I looked everywhere.”
    The lie I’d prepared came out easily. “I got up early and took Chico for a ride.I wanted to see Paco. Then I heard the planes, and Chico just bolted. I couldn’t stop her. I tried but she galloped off into the hills, and I clung on.”
    “Thank God she did. And thank God you went for a ride that morning,” said Maria. “If you hadn’t, then we’d both be dead, like Mother and Father.”
    Uncle Juan drew us closer. “I’ve decided,” he whispered. “You take Chica, and you go tonight, now.”
    “Why?” I asked him.
    “Because we are too many here. There’s not enough food to go round. Because sooner or later we’ll be discovered and will have to fight. We will fight, and fight as well as we can. But we are few and they are many. I don’t want you to be here when it happens.” Maria tried to interrupt. “No arguments, Maria. I have thought it all through. It’s the only way.
    “I want you to go to Malaga, to my mother’s house – you’ve been there, Maria, you’ll find the way. Kiss her for me, Antonito, and look after her. Be a son to her. Will you do this for me?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Follow the river down into the valley. You’ll join the road there. The
Guardia Civil
won’t harm you. You are children. They have children of their own.”
    He led us to where Chica stood, white in the moonlight. He held us for a moment, kissed us both on the forehead, then picked us up one by one and sat us astride Chica.
    “Go with God,” he whispered, and we rode away along the riverbank and left him there. We kept turning in the saddle to see him, until the darkness took him from us and we were alone.
    We did see soldiers, lots of them, but luckily they ignored us. Several times the
Guardia Civil
stopped and questioned us. Maria told them we were visiting our great aunt in Malaga, and each time they nodded us through. Wherever we stopped for the night people fed us and gave us shelter. If I learned one thing on that last journey, and while hiding in the hills with the refugees, it was that menand women have a capacity for kindness as great if not greater than their capacity for evil.
    When at last, after many days’ travel,