The Quest

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘We see you, great chief,’ they chorused. Kalulu struggled up on one elbow, and stared at the newcomer with trepidation. Basma was paramount chief of all the Basmara tribes that inhabited the land between Tamafupa and Kioga. Before the coming of the strangers who had built the temple and raised the Red Stones from the depths of the lake, he had been a mighty ruler. Now his tribes were scattered and his rule disrupted.

  ‘Hail, mighty Basma,’ Kalulu said respectfully. ‘I am your dog.’ I Basma was his bitter rival and enemy. Until this time Kalulu had been protected by his reputation and status. Even the chief of the Bslsmara had not dared to harm a shaman of his power and influence. However, Kalulu knew that ever since the damming of the Nile, Basma had been waiting for his opportunity.

  ‘I have been watching you, wizard,’ Basma said coldly.

  ‘I am honoured that such a mighty chief would even notice my humble existence,’ Kalulu murmured. Ten Basmara warriors stepped out of the thicket and formed up behind their chief.

  ‘You have led these enemies of the tribe to Tamafupa. They have taken over my town.’

  ‘They are not enemies,’ Kalulu replied. ‘They are our friends and allies. Their leader is a great shaman, much more learned and powerful than I am. He has been sent here to destroy the Red Stones and to make the Nile flow again.’

  ‘What feeble lies are these, you pathetic legless thing? Those men are the same sorcerers who built the temple at the mouth of the river, the same wizards who called up the wrath of the dark spirits, who caused the lake waters to boil and the earth to burst open. They are the ones who conjured up the rocks from the depths, and blocked off the great river, which is our mother and our father.’

  ‘That is not so.’ Kalulu hopped off his litter and balanced on his stumps to confront Basma. ‘Those people are our friends.’

  Slowly Basma raised his spear and pointed it at the dwarf. This was a gesture of condemnation. Kalulu looked at his bodyguards. They were not members of a tribe subservient to Basma, one of the many reasons he had selected them. They came from a warrior tribe far to the north.

  However, when it came to a choice between himself and Basma he could not be certain in which direction their loyalty would sway. As if in answer to his unspoken question, the eight women tightened their ranks around him. Imbali, the flower, was their leader. Her body might have been carved from anthracite. Her jet skin was anointed with oil so that it glowed in the sunlight. Her arms and legs were sleek with fine flat muscle. Her breasts were high and hard, decorated with an intricate pattern of ritual scarification. Her neck was long and proud. Her eyes were fierce. She loosened the battleaxe from the loop at her waist. The others followed her example.

  ‘Your whores will not save you now, Kalulu,’ Basma sneered disdain .fully. ‘Kill the wizard,’ he shouted at his warriors, and hurled his spear at Kalulu.

  Imbali anticipated the throw. She jumped forward, swung the battle axe in her right hand and hit the spear in mid-air, knocking it straight upwards. As it fell back she caught it neatly in her left hand and raised the point to meet the rush of warriors. The first man ran on to it, transfixing himself just below the sternum. He reeled backwards into the man coming up behind him, knocking him off balance. Then he dropped on to his back and lay kicking with the shaft of the spear standing out of his belly. Imbali leapt gracefully over his corpse, and caught the man behind him before he could recover. She swung the axe in a rising stroke that lopped off his spear-arm neatly at the elbow. She pirouetted and used the momentum to decapitate a third man as he rushed forward. The headless corpse dropped into a sitting position, the open arteries sending up a tall fountain of bright red, then flopped over and bled into the earth.

  Shielding Kalulu, Imbali and the other women fell back quickly and picked up the litter by its rawhide carrying straps. Then using it as a battering ram, they charged into the Basmara. Their war-cry was a shrill ululation as the axe blades whistled and fluted, then thudded into flesh and bone.

  Basma’s men rallied swiftly. They met the women with a wall of locked shields and threw their long spears at their heads. One went down, killed outright with a flint point through her throat. The others raised the litter and hammered it into the line of shields. Both sides heaved against each other. One of the Basmara dropped to his knees and stabbed up under the bottom edge of the litter into the belly of the girl at the centre of the line. She released her grip and reeled backwards. She tried to turn away but her assailant jerked his spear free and stabbed again, aiming for her kidneys. The blow went in deep and the girl screamed as the blade slipped alongside her spine crippling her instantly.

  Kalulu’s bodyguards retreated a few steps, filled the gap left by the wounded girl and held the litter steady. The Basmara raised their shields and, once more, charged shoulder to shoulder. As they crashed into the litter they stabbed up under the bottom edge of the shields, aiming for groins and bellies. The line of shields swayed back and forth. Two more girls went down, one hit in the upper thigh so that the femoral artery erupted. She fell back and tried to stem the bleeding by pushing her fingers into the wound to pinch the artery closed. While she was bowed over her back was exposed and a Basmara stabbed her in the spine. The spearhead found the joint between her vertebrae, and her paralysed legs gave way. The man stabbed her again, but while he was concentrating on killing her, Imbali ducked under the litter and chopped deep into his skull.

  The uneven pressure on the litter slewed it round. Kalulu was left unprotected on one flank. Chief Basma seized the moment: he darted out of the wall of shields, dodged around the litter and ran at him. Kalulu saw him coming and swung himself into a handstand. With amazing agility he shot towards the shelter of the nearby thicket of kittar thorns.

  He had almost reached it when Basma overhauled him and stabbed him twice. ‘Traitor!’ the chief screamed, and the spearhead hit Kalulu in the centre of the back. With a huge effort he managed to stay balanced on his hands. He bounced along, but Basma caught up with him again.

  ‘Witchmonger!’ he yelled and thrust again, deeply through the little man’s inverted crotch and into his belly. Kalulu howled and tumbled into the thicket. Basma tried to follow up his attack, but from the corner of his eye he saw Imbali rushing at him with her axe above her head. He ducked and when her blade hissed past his ear, he swerved away from her return stroke and ran. His men saw him go and followed, pelting away down the slope.

  ‘The sorcerer is dead!’ Basma shouted.

  His warriors took up the chant: ‘Kalulu is dead! The familiar of devils and demons is slain!’

  ‘Leave them to run back to the bitches that whelped them.’ Imbali stopped her girls chasing them. ‘We must save our master.’

  By the time they found him in the thicket Kalulu was curled into a ball, whimpering with pain. Tenderly they extricated him from the hooked thorn branches and placed him on his litter. At that moment a shout from further down the slope checked them.

  ‘It is the voice of the old man.’ Imbali had recognized Taita, and ululated to direct them.

  Soon Taita and Fenn came into view, followed closely by the party carrying Meren on his litter.

  ‘Kalulu, you are wounded grievously,’ Taita said gently.

  ‘Nay, Magus, not wounded.’ Kalulu shook his head painfully. ‘I fear I am slain.’

  ‘Swiftly. Take him to the camp!’ Taita told Imbali and her three surviving companions. ‘And you men!’ He picked out four following Meren’s litter. ‘Your help is needed here!’

  ‘Wait!’ Kalulu seized Taita’s hand to prevent him leaving. ‘The man who did this is Basma, the paramount chief of Basmara.’

  ‘Why did he attack you? You are his subject, surely?’

  ‘Basma believes that you are of the same tribe who built the temple, and that you have come here to instigate further calamity and catastrophe. He thinks I have joined with you to destroy the land, the rivers, the lakes and to kill all the Basmara.’

  ‘He has gone now. You
r women have driven him away.’ Taita tried to reassure and calm him.

  Kalulu would have none of it. ‘He will return.’ He reached up and seized Taita’s wrist as he stooped over the litter. ‘You must get into the town and prepare to defend yourselves. Basma will return with all his regiments.’

  ‘When I leave Tamafupa, I will take you with me, Kalulu. Our pursuit of the witch cannot succeed without your help.’

  ‘I can feel the bleeding deep in my belly. I will not be going on with you.’

  Before sunset Kalulu died. The four bodyguards dug an adit into the side of a large abandoned anthill outside the stockade of Tamafupa. Taita wrapped the corpse in a sheet of unbleached linen and they laid it in the damp clay tunnel. Then they sealed it with large boulders to prevent the hyenas digging it out.

  ‘Your ancestral gods will welcome you, Shaman Kalulu, for you were of the Truth.’ Taita bade him farewell.

  When he turned away from the tomb, the four bodyguards stood before him, and Imbali spoke for them all in the Shilluk language. ‘Our master is gone. We are far from our own land, alone. You are a mighty shaman, greater even than Kalulu. We will follow you.’

  Taita looked at Nakonto. ‘What do you make of these women? If I enlist them, will you take them under your command?’ he asked.

  Nakonto considered the question solemnly. ‘I have seen them fight. I will be content to have them follow me.’

  With a regal tilt of her head, Imbali acknowledged his presence and his words. ‘For as long as it pleases us to do so, we will march shoulder to shoulder with this strutting Shilluk rooster, but not behind him,’ she told Taita.

  Her eyes were almost on a level with Nakonto’s. The magnificent pair stared at each other with apparent scorn. Taita opened his Inner Eye and smiled as he saw how their auras mirrored the inclination they felt towards each other. ‘Nakonto, is it agreed?’ he asked.

  ‘It is agreed.’ Nakonto made another lordly gesture of acquiescence.

  ‘For the time being.’

  Fenn and the Shilluk camp-followers swept out one of the largest huts for Meren. Then Fenn burnt a handful of Taita’s special herbs in the open fireplace. The aromatic smoke drove out the insects and spiders that had made the hut their home. They cut a mattress of fresh grass and laid Meren’s sleeping mat upon it. He was in such pain that he could hardly raise his head to drink from the bowl that Fenn held to his lips. Taita promoted Hilto-bar-Hilto to take his place at the head of the four divisions until Meren had recovered sufficiently to assume command again.

  Taita and Hilto toured the town to inspect the defences. Their first concern was to ensure that the water supply was secure. There was a deep well in the centre of the village, with a narrow circular clay staircase descending to the water, which was of good quality. Taita ordered that a party under Shofar should fill all of the gourds and waterskins in readiness for the anticipated assault by the Basmara. In the thick of the fighting, thirsty men would have no opportunity to draw from the well.

  Taita’s next concern was the condition of the outer stockade. They found that it was still in a reasonable state of repair, except for a few sections where termites had eaten the poles. However, it was immediately apparent that they could not hope to hold such an extended line.

  Tamafupa was a big town that had once been home to a large tribe. The stockade was almost half a league in circumference. ‘We will have to shorten it,’ he told Hilto, ‘then burn the remainder of the town to clear the approaches and enable our archers to cover the ground.’

  ‘You have set us a daunting task, Magus,’ Hilto remarked. ‘We had better begin at once.’

  Once Taita had marked out the new perimeter, men and women fell to. They dug out the best preserved of the stockade poles and set them up along the line Taita had surveyed. There was no time to make a permanent fortification, so they filled the gaps with branches of kittar thorn bush. They erected tall watch-towers at the four compass points of the new stockade, which commanded a good view over the valley and all the approaches.

  Taita ordered bonfires to be set around the perimeter. When they were lit they would illuminate the stockade walls in the event of a night attack. Once this was done he built an inner keep round the well, their last line of defence if the Basmara regiments broke into the town. Within this inner stronghold, he stored the remaining bags of dhurra, the spare weapons and all other valuable supplies. They built stables for the remaining horses. Windsmoke and her colt were still in good condition, but many others were sick or dying after the long hard road they had travelled.

  Every evening after she had fed Meren and helped Taita change the dressing over the empty socket of his right eye, Fenn went down to visit Whirlwind and take him the dhurra cakes he loved.

  Taita waited for a favourable wind before he set fire to the remains of the old town that lay outside the new stockade. The thatch and wooden walls had dried and burned rapidly, the wind blowing the flames away from the new walls. By nightfall that day the old town was levelled to a smouldering field of ashes.

  ‘Let the Basmara attack across that open ground,’ Hilto observed, with satisfaction, ‘and we will shock them.’

  ‘Now you can set up markers in front of the stockade,’ Taita told him.

  They placed cairns of white river stones at twenty, fifty and a hundred paces so that the archers could have the enemy accurately ranged as they sent in their attacks.

  Taita sent Imbali with her companions and the other women to the dry river to cut reeds for arrow-making. He had brought bags of spare arrowheads from the armoury at Qebui fort, and when they had been used, he discovered an outcrop of flint in the hillside below the stockade.

  He showed the women how to chip the flint fragments into arrowheads.

  They learnt the skill quickly, then bound the heads into the reed shafts with bark twine and soaked them in water to make them tight and hard.

  They stacked bundles of spare arrows at salient points along the perimeter of the stockade.

  Within ten days all of the preparation had been completed. The men and Imbali’s women sharpened their weapons and checked their equipment for what might be the last time.

  One evening as the men gathered around the fires for the evening meal, there was a sudden stir and a burst of cheering as an ill-assorted couple came into the firelight. Meren was unsteady on his feet, but supported himself with a hand on Fenn’s shoulder as he came to where Taita sat with the captains. They all jumped to their feet and crowded round him, laughing and congratulating him on his swift recovery.

  A linen bandage covered his empty eye socket, and he was pale and thinner, but he was making an effort to walk with something of his old swagger, and countered the sallies of the officers with ribald ripostes. At last he stood before Taita and saluted him.

  ‘Ho, Meren, bored with lying abed to be tended by all the females in camp?’ Taita had spoken with a smile but he had difficulty in repressing the pang he felt when he saw the callused warrior’s hand on Fenn’s dainty shoulder. He knew that his jealousy would become keener as her body and beauty matured. He had experienced that corrosive emotion during her other life.

  The following morning Meren was at the practice butts with the archers. At first he had difficulty in keeping his balance with only one eye to steady himself, but with fierce concentration he was at last able to master his unruly senses and train them anew. His next difficulty came in estimating the range and the hold-over of his aim. His arrows either dropped away before they reached the target or flew high above it. Grimly he persevered. Taita, who had been the champion archer in all the armies of Queen Lostris, coached him, teaching him the technique of letting fly his first arrow as a marker, and using it to correct the second, which he released immediately afterwards. Soon Meren could loose a second while the first was still in flight. Fenn and the Shilluk wives made him a leather eyepatch to cover the unsightly socket. His countenance regained its naturally healthy hue, and the remaining eye its old sparkle.


  Every morning Taita sent out a mounted patrol, but they returned each evening without having discovered any sign of the Basmara regiments.

  Taita consulted Imbali and her women.

  ‘We know Chief Basma well. He is a vengeful, merciless man,’ Imbali told him. ‘He has not forgotten us. His regiments are scattered along the hills of the Valley of the Great Rift, in the river gorges and the marshes of the lakes. It will take time for him to muster them, but in the end he will come. We can be certain of it.’

  Now that the most important preparations had been completed, Taita had time for less vital work. He showed the women how to make dummy human heads with lumps of clay and grass set on top of long poles. These they painted with natural pigments, until the results were convincing when seen from a distance. They enjoyed this more than arrow-making.

  However, the waiting was starting to wear on their nerves.

  ‘Even considering the distance they must cover from here to Kioga, Basmara should have arrived,’ Taita told Meren, as they ate their dinner round the campfire. ‘Tomorrow you and I will ride out to scout the terrain for ourselves.’

  ‘And I shall go with you,’ piped up Fenn.

  ‘We shall see about that when the time comes,’ said Taita, gruffly.

  ‘Thank you, beloved Taita,’ she said, her smile sweet and sunny.

  ‘That was not what I meant,’ he replied, but they both knew that it was.

  The child was endlessly fascinating, and Taita delighted in her presence. He felt that she had become an extension of his own being.

  When the patrol rode out, Fenn was between Taita and Meren.

  Nakonto and Imbali trotted ahead as trackers to read the sign. On her long legs Imbali could match Nakonto over the leagues. Habari and two troopers brought up the rear. For once Taita wore a sheathed sword at his waist, but carried his staff in his hand.

  They rode along the crest of the hills whence they could look down the full length of the valley. On the left the terrain was rolling and heavily forested. They saw numerous large herds of elephant spread out below the ridge. Their huge grey bodies showed up clearly in every open glade, and every so often a large fruit-bearing tree was sent crashing to earth by their massive strength. When a tree was too strong to yield to the efforts of a single beast, the other bulls came to his assistance. No tree could resist their combined assault.