The Quest

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘The native tribes hereabouts have a potion that they distil from wild berries. They dose their cattle with it.’

  ‘Why did they not warn Colonel That of this disease before he left Fort Adari?’

  ‘At that time we had no contact with the tribes. It was only when I returned with the fly-ridden herd that they came forward to sell us the medicine.’

  ‘Is it efficacious?’

  ‘It is not infallible,’ Tolas told him. ‘It appears to me that it will, cure six out of ten horses that have been fly-struck. But perhaps those horses I tried it on had already been too long infected.’

  ‘What would have been your losses if you had not used it?’

  ‘I cannot tell for certain.’

  ‘Then guess.’

  ‘It seems to me that some animals have a natural resistance to the sting. A very few, say, five in a hundred, will show no ill-effects. Others, perhaps thirty or forty in a hundred, will sicken but recover. The rest die. Any animal that is infected but recovers is immune to any subsequent infection.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘The natives know it well.’

  ‘How many of the horses in your care have been infected but have recovered?’

  ‘Most were too far gone before we could dose them. However, eighteen are salted,’ Tolas answered promptly, then clarified, ‘They are immune.’

  ‘So, Tolas, I will need a goodly supply of this native potion. Can you procure it for me?’

  ‘I can do better. I have had almost nine years to study the matter. Although the tribesmen are secretive and will not divulge the recipe, I have discovered for myself the plant that they use. I have spied upon them while their women are gathering it.’

  ‘You will show it to me?’

  ‘Of course, Magus,’ Tolas agreed readily. ‘But, again, I caution you ‘that even when treated many horses will still die. Your grey mare is too fine an animal to expose to such risk.’

  Taita smiled. It was apparent that Tolas had fallen in love with Windsmoke and was angling for a way to keep her with him. “I will take into careful consideration all you have told me. But now my main concern is to learn the secret of the cure.’

  ‘With the permission of Captain Rabat, I will take you into the forest tomorrow to gather the berries. It is a ride of several hours to reach the area where they grow.’

  ‘Excellent.’ Taita was pleased. ‘Now describe for me the road to the south that you travelled with Colonel That.’ Tolas told them all he could remember, while Fenn made notes on a clay tablet. When he had finished Taita said, ‘What you have told me, Tolas, is invaluable, but now you must describe how we will recognize the boundary of the fly territory.’

  Tolas placed his forefinger on the sketch map that Fenn had drawn on the tablet. ‘On about the twentieth day of the journey southwards you will come upon a pair of hills shaped like a virgin’s breasts. They will be visible from several leagues off. Those hills mark the boundary. I counsel you not to take the grey mare further. You will lose her in the sad country that lies beyond.’

  The next morning Captain Rabat went with them, riding beside Taita, when they set out in search of the berries. The pace was easy, and they had much opportunity to talk.

  After several hours, Tolas led them into a grove of enormous wild fig trees strung out along the bank of the river, deep in the gorge. Most of the branches were draped with serpentine vines, upon which grew clusters of small purple-black berries. Fenn, Tolas and three other men, whom Tolas had brought from the fort, climbed into the trees. Each had a leather harvesting bag slung round their neck into which they packed the fruit. When they clambered down from the trees their hands were stained purple and the berries emitted a sickly, putrid odour. Fenn offered a handful to Whirlwind, but the colt refused it. Windsmoke was equally disdainful.

  ‘It is not to their natural taste, I grant, but if you mix the berries into dhurra meal and bake it into cakes they will eat them readily enough,’

  Tolas said. He lit a fire and placed flat river stones in the flames. While they heated he demonstrated how to pound the fruit into a paste and mix it with the dhurra meal. ‘The proportions are important. One of fruit to five of the meal. Any larger amount of the berries and the horse will refuse it, or if they eat it they will purge excessively,’ he explained. When the stones were crackling hot he put handfuls of the mixture on to them and let it bake into hard cakes. He laid them aside to cool and began another batch. ‘The cakes will keep without spoiling for many months, even in the worst conditions. The horses will eat them even when they are covered with green mould.’

  Fenn picked one up and burnt her fingers. She passed it from hand to hand and blew on it until it cooled, then took it to Windsmoke. The mare sniffed it, fluttering her nostrils. Then she took it between her lips and rolled her eyes at Taita.

  ‘Go on, you silly thing,’ he told her sternly. ‘Eat. It is good for you.’

  Windsmoke crunched the cake. A few scraps fell out of her mouth, but she swallowed the rest. Then she lowered her head to pick up the pieces from the grass. Whirlwind was watching her with interest. When Fenn brought him a cake he followed her example and ate it with gusto.

  Then he pushed Fenn with his muzzle, demanding more.

  ‘What dose do you give them?’ Taita asked Tolas.

  ‘It was a matter of experiment,’ Tolas replied. ‘As soon as they show any symptoms of being fly-struck I give them four or five cakes each day until the symptoms disappear, then continue the dose until long after they seem fully recovered.’

  ‘What do you call the fruit?’ Fenn demanded.

  Tolas shrugged. ‘The Ootasa have some outlandish name for it, but I have never thought to give it an Egyptian one.’

  “Then I shall name it the Tolas fruit,’ Fenn announced, and Tolas smiled, gratified.

  The following day Taita and Fenn returned to the grove with Shofar, four troopers and the equipment they needed to bake a large quantity of Tolas cakes. They set up camp in the midst of the grove, in a clearing that overlooked the dry bed of the Nile. They stayed there for ten days, and filled twenty large leather sacks with the cakes. When they returned with purple-stained hands and ten baggage-loaded mules, they found Meren and his men eager to leave.

  When they bade Rabat farewell, he told Taita dolefully, ‘We shall probably never meet again in this life, Magus, but it has been a great honour for me to be allowed to render you some small service.’

  ‘I am grateful for your willing assistance and cheerful company. Pharaoh himself will hear of it,’ Taita assured him.

  They struck out again southwards, with Tolas as their guide, towards the hills shaped like a virgin’s breasts, and the fly country. Their time at Fort Adari had refreshed men and animals and they made good progress.

  Taita ordered that the hunters should keep the tails of the animal game they caught. He showed the men how to skin them, scrape flesh, salt them, then leave them to dry in the air. Meanwhile they carved wood into handles and inserted them into the tubes of dried skin in place of the bone they had removed. Finally Taita brandished one of the fly switches and told them, ‘Soon you will be grateful for these. It is probably the only weapon that will discourage the fly.’

  On the twentieth morning after they had left Fort Adari they made the customary early start on the day’s trek. Then at a little past noon, as Tolas had predicted, the twin nipples of the hills, like the breasts of a virgin, thrust above the horizon.

  ‘No further. Order the halt,’ Taita called to Meren. He had decided before they left Fort Adari that he would not follow Tolas’s advice slavishly. He had already been dosing Windsmoke and Whirlwind with the cakes and hoped that the medicine would concentrate in their blood long before they suffered the first sting. On that last evening before they entered the fly territory he took Fenn with him to the horse lines. When she saw them coming Windsmoke whickered. Taita rubbed her forehead and scratched behind her ears, then fed her a Tolas cake. Fenn d
id the same for Whirlwind. By now both had developed a taste for the cakes and swallowed them with appetite. Tolas had been watching from the shadows. Now he approached Taita and greeted him diffidently. ‘So you are taking the grey mare and her foal with you?’ he asked.

  ‘I could not bear to leave them behind,’ Taita replied.

  Tolas sighed. ‘I understand, Magus. Perhaps I would have done the same, for already I love them. I pray to Horus and Isis that they will survive.’

  ‘Thank you, Tolas. We will all come together again, of that I am certain.’

  Next morning they parted company. Tolas could guide them no further and turned back for Fort Adari. Nakonto was out on the point, breaking the trail, Meren and three squads marching behind him. Taita and Fenn came next, on Windsmoke and Whirlwind. The eighteen salted horses followed in a loose herd. Shabako, with the fourth squad, brought up the rear.

  They camped that evening under the hills. While they ate their dinner by the fires a pride of hunting lions began to roar on the dark plain beyond the hills, a menacing sound. Taita and Meren went to check the head ropes of the tethered horses, but the lions did not come closer and gradually their roars receded and the silence of the night settled over them.

  The next morning, while the column mustered, Taita and Fenn fed the horses their Tolas cakes. Then they mounted and rode on between the twin hills. Taita had just relaxed into the rhythm of the march when suddenly he straightened and stared at Windsmoke’s neck. A large dark insect had appeared on her creamy hide, close to her mane. He cupped his right hand and waited for the insect to settle, extend its sharp black proboscis and probe for the blood vessels beneath the mare’s skin. The buried sting anchored it, so he was able to snatch it up in his cupped hands. It buzzed shrilly as it tried to escape but he tightened his; grip and crushed its head and body. Then he held it between two fingers and showed it to Fenn. ‘This is a fly that the tribes call the tsetse. It is the first of many to come,’ he predicted. At the words, another fly settled on his neck and plunged its sting into the soft skin behind his ear.

  He winced and slapped at it. Although he caught it a hard blow, it shot away seemingly unharmed.

  ‘Get out your fly switches,’ Meren ordered, and soon they were all lashing at themselves and their mounts, like religious flagellants, trying to drive off the stinging swarms. The following days were a torment as the flies plagued them ceaselessly. They were at their worst during the heat of the day, but kept up the attack by the light of the moon and the stars, maddening men and horses alike.

  The tails of the horses lashed continuously against their flanks and hindquarters. They tossed their heads and twitched their skins as they tried to shake off the flies that crawled into their ears and eyes.

  The faces of the men swelled like some grotesque crimson fruit and their eyes became slits in the puffy flesh. The backs of their necks were lumpy and the itching was intolerable. With their fingernails they scratched raw the skin behind their ears. At night they built smudge fires ,of dried elephant dung and crouched, coughing and gasping, in the acrid smoke to seek respite. But as soon as they moved away for a breath of fresh air the flies arrowed in on them, driving their stings deep at the instant they landed. Their bodies were so tough that a hard blow with the palm of a hand hardly disturbed them. Even when they were knocked from their perch, they rebounded in the same movement, stinging again ion some other exposed body part. The fly switches were the only effective weapon. They did not kill them, but the long tail hairs tangled legs and wings and held them so that they could be crushed between the fingers.

  ‘There is a limit to the range of these monsters,’ Taita encouraged the men. ‘Nakonto knows their habits well. He says that as suddenly as we came upon them we will be free of them.’

  Meren ordered forced marches and rode at the head of the column, setting a driving pace. Deprived of sleep and weakened by the venom that the flies pumped into their blood the men swayed in their saddles.

  When a trooper collapsed his comrades threw him over the back of his horse and rode on.

  Nakonto alone was inured to the insects. His skin remained smooth and glossy, unmarked by stings. He allowed the insects to suck themselves full of his blood so that they could not fly. Then he mocked them as he tore off their wings: ‘I have been stabbed by men, leopards have bitten me and lions clawed me. Who are you to annoy me? Now you can walk home to hell.’

  On the tenth day after they had left the hills, they rode out of the fly country. It happened so suddenly that they were taken unawares. At one moment they were cursing and flogging at the whirling insects, then fifty paces further on the silence of the forest was no longer disturbed by the vicious whine. Within a league of passing out of the tyranny they came upon an isolated river pool. Meren took pity on the party. ‘Fall out!’ he roared. ‘The last one into the water is a simpering virgin.’

  There was a rush of naked bodies, then the forest rang with cries of relief and jubilation. When they emerged from the pool, Taita and Fenn ministered to everyone’s swollen stings, smearing them with one of the magus’s salves. That night the laughter and banter round the campfires was unstinted.

  It was dark when Fenn knelt over Taita and shook him awake. ‘Come quickly, Taitai. Something terrible is happening.’ She seized his hand and dragged him to the horse lines. ‘It’s both of them.’ Fenn’s voice cracked with distress. ‘Windsmoke and Whirlwind together.’

  When they reached the lines, the colt was down, his body heaving to the urgent tempo of his breathing. Windsmoke stood over him, licking his head with long strokes of her tongue. She reeled weakly as she tried to keep her balance. Her coat was standing on end and she was drenched with sweat: it dripped from her belly and ran down all four legs.

  ‘Call Shofar and his troops. Tell them to hurry. Then run and ask them to fill their largest pot with hot water and bring it to me.’ Taita’s main concern was to get Whirlwind back on his feet and keep Windsmoke on hers. Once a horse was down it had lost the will to fight and surrendered to the disease.

  Shofar and his men lifted Whirlwind and placed him on his feet, then Taita sponged him with warm water. Fenn stood at his head blowing softly into his nostrils, whispering encouragement and endearments while she persuaded him to eat one Tolas cake after another.

  As soon as he had bathed the colt, Taita turned to Windsmoke.

  ‘Be brave, my darling,’ he murmured, as he wiped her down with a wet linen rag. Meren helped him to dry her vigorously with fresh cloths, and then they spread Taita’s tiger-skin over her back. ‘You and I will defeat this thing together.’ He kept talking quietly to her, and used the voice of power whenever he spoke her name. She cocked her ears to listen to him, splayed her legs and braced herself to keep her balance.

  ‘Bak-her, Windsmoke. Do not give in.”

  He hand-fed her the Tolas cakes, which he had dipped in honey. Even in her distress she could not resist this delicacy. Then he persuaded her to swallow a bowl of his special remedy for fever, yellow-strangler and equine distemper. He and Fenn joined hands to invoke the protection of Horus, in his form as the god of horses. Meren and his men joined in the prayers, and continued to chant them for the rest of the night. By morning, Windsmoke and her colt were still standing, but their heads were hanging and they would no longer take the cakes. They were, however, consumed by thirst, and drank eagerly from the pots of clean water that Fenn and Taita held for them. Just before noon Windsmoke raised her head and whickered to her colt, then staggered across to him and nuzzled his shoulder. He raised his head to look at her.

  ‘He has lifted his head,’ one man said excitedly.

  ‘She stands more firmly,’ another observed. ‘She is fighting for herself and for her foal.’

  ‘She has stopped sweating. The fever is breaking.’

  That evening Windsmoke ate five more Tolas cakes with honey. The next morning she followed Taita down into the riverbed and rolled in the white sand. She had always favoured a particular
variety of soft grass with fluffy pink seed heads that grew on the banks of the Nile, so Taita and Fenn scythed bundles of it and sorted from it the choicest stalks.

  On the fourth day both Windsmoke and Whirlwind filled their empty bellies with it.

  ‘They are out of danger,’ Taita pronounced, and Fenn hugged Whirlwind, then wept as though her heart had broken and would never mend.

  Despite the Tolas cakes, many other horses showed symptoms of the disease. Twelve died, but Meren replaced them from the small herd of salted animals. Some men were also suffering from the effects of the fly venom: they were racked with enervating headaches, and every joint in their bodies was so stiff that they could hardly walk. It was many more days before animals and men had recovered enough to resume the march.

  Even then Taita and Fenn would not burden Windsmoke and Whirlwind with their weight, but rode spare horses and led them on their halter ropes. Meren reduced the length and pace of his daily marches to allow them all to recover completely. Then, over the days that followed, he increased the speed until they were moving briskly once more.

  For two hundred leagues beyond the flies the land was devoid of human habitation. Then they encountered a small village of itinerant fishermen. The inhabitants fled as soon as the column of horsemen appeared. The shock of meeting these pale-skinned men with their strange bronze weapons, riding on strange hornless cattle, was too much for them. Taita examined their fish-smoking racks, and found them almost empty. The Nile no longer provided the village with her bounty.

  Clearly the fishermen were starving.

  On the floodplains along the riverbank herds of large, robust antelope, with scimitar horns and white patches around their eyes, were feeding.

  The males were black, the females dark red. Meren sent out five of his mounted archers. The antelope seemed curious about the horses, and came to meet them. The first volley of arrows brought down four, and the next as many again. They laid out the carcasses on the outskirts of the village as a peace-offering, then settled down to wait. The starving villagers could not long resist and crept forward cautiously, ready to flee again at the first sign of aggression from the strangers. Once they had butchered the carcasses and had the meat grilling on a dozen smoky fires, Nakonto went forward to hail them. Their spokesman was a venerable greybeard, who replied in a squeaky treble.