by Wilbur Smith
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘A mosquito, possibly.’
‘Which you’re looking for on the ground?’ said Amelia.
‘Dumb, eh?’ I admitted.
I knew it wasn’t a mosquito. The thought of what it might have been filled me with dread: a scorpion; a spider; even, possibly, a snake? I had no idea! And I would never know. I couldn’t do anything about whatever it was, except hope.
Addie had finished rubbing at his ankle. He was insisting he could go on. Meanwhile, the electric nip I’d felt had softened to an ominous pulsing sensation. Real fear gripped me then. Might the bite have been poisonous? Was the venom working its way into my bloodstream?
‘You’re sure you’re all right, Jack?’ said Xander.
‘Fine, yes,’ I replied.
But I wasn’t. The throbbing grew heavier, giving me a dead leg from knee to hip. Addie was flexing his foot and Mo, who’d been focusing on him rather than me, had unscrewed the cap of his water bottle. Around us other kids did the same. If Amelia or Xander suspected I wasn’t telling the truth they were too worried to press the point.
‘Wait,’ said Amelia.
Mo turned around.
I wasn’t prepared for what she said next. ‘Where’s the other dog?’
The hound was still with us, sitting patiently beside me, but she was right, I’d not seen the heavier-set dog since we stopped.
Xander said, ‘I’m sure he’s around here somewhere,’ without conviction.
‘You had him tethered, didn’t you?’ said Amelia.
Xander didn’t reply.
‘If he’s gone, it will be back to camp,’ murmured Mo.
My pulsing leg was lead-heavy. A wave of helplessness swept through me, very nearly dropping me to my knees.
We were in the middle of nowhere, in the dead of night, with the sky howling above us, on the run from a crazy, slave-driving warlord. I’d been bitten or stung by God-knew-what. My leg was turning to stone; for all I knew the rest of me would follow and I’d seize up entirely. I might even die. On top of that, one of the tracker dogs we’d worked so hard to tease away from General Sir had slunk off back to him. If Mo was right about that then the dog would be able to follow its own trail here at the General’s command, and before long they’d outrun us. The situation was completely hopeless.
‘Talk about “you had one job”,’ said Amelia, acid in her voice.
Xander’s head dropped.
I turned to Amelia. Truthful to a fault, she’s never normally mean. To have snapped at Xander like that she had to be panicked to the point of an imminent meltdown. Such a loss of control – in her, particularly – was frightening.
Xander, never normally at a loss for words, was mute. He looked like he wanted the ground to swallow him up.
And Mo was muttering to himself, wringing his hands, while his entourage stood dumbly before us. Not four hours into a three-day ordeal and we were coming apart at the seams.
50.
‘Enough!’ I said, thumping my numb leg. ‘The dog could yet turn up or go anywhere. It doesn’t matter! Nothing does, except carrying on. Addie’s OK. We have a head start. Let’s build on it. Mo, lead the way!’
Nobody moved.
‘Give me Addie’s pack,’ I said, reaching for it. ‘Here, mine’s lighter, tell him to take it,’ I said to Mo.
Ignoring my dead leg, I swung Addie’s rucksack onto my back. It felt full of bricks, hard edged and heavy. But that was almost reassuring, given the nothingness of my right thigh. I tried to think positively. At least my leg was still capable of keeping me upright. I took a couple of steps and was relieved to see that the signal sent to my foot by my brain got through. Though I couldn’t feel much below my right hip, the foot went where I’d hoped it would.
‘Come on, Mo!’ I forced some brightness into my voice. ‘We have to push on. Keep Addie beside you. Set a pace he can follow. And tell everyone to stick close together so we don’t get separated. I’ll bring up the rear. OK?’
After hesitating for what seemed a dreadful minute but was probably only a few reluctant seconds, Mo nodded. I was so relieved. He addressed the others with more fire in his voice, his hands tightening into fists. A pulse of murmuring agreement went through the group. ‘You’re right,’ he said to me. ‘There’s no turning back now.’
With that he set off and the others, a string pulled tight behind him, followed one by one. I was last. I’d put myself at the back for two reasons. First, if my limping was obvious, people would be less likely to see it. And second, if I couldn’t keep up, I’d slip off the back without harming the rest of the group’s chances. Mo was their best hope of making it out of here and I didn’t want to be responsible for our failure.
We made slower progress anyway, presumably because of Addie’s ankle. The numbness of my leg didn’t get to me as much as the uncertainty of the injury. What would happen next? Would the poison – if that’s what it was – spread through me, shutting the rest of me down?
My back was slick with sweat. I didn’t know if that was a symptom of something worse to come, or just plain fear. I was overheating but the night itself was cooled by the slicing wind.
In a way it was a mercy that I had to concentrate so hard on keeping up without stumbling and falling. Placing my right foot down safely was as tricky as threading a needle in the dark.
I forced myself to keep behind the little lad in his baseball boots, ignore the weight of Addie’s pack as best I could, and shut out all my thoughts before they got going. It was impossible to do that entirely: nagging doubts kept sprouting into full-blown pangs of panic as we forged on through the dark.
On we walked, on and on. I was in a complete daze. The numbness of my leg grew into itself, stiffening into a warm, pulsing pain. Was that a good sign or bad? A mile or so further on the pain was sharper still. But I was able to keep up, forcing myself through it.
Amelia was ahead of the kid in the boots. She’d taken hold of the remaining dog’s rope. It drifted along beside her as contentedly as it had walked next to me. At one point the scrub we were picking our way through erupted with shrieking birds and the dog barked at them as they blew away. Would the other one have made it back to camp by now? Even if it had, General Sir should still be asleep, surely. We had until morning, and that was hours away.
Except that, astonishingly, as soon as I’d had that thought, the rushing black sky to my left seemed to be turning indigo. Left was east. Within minutes the bruise above the horizon was an umber stripe. We’d walked right through the night and dawn was about to break.
I’d seen the contours of low hills against the night sky, but as it grew lighter the full extent of our exposure became clear: the scrubland was an endless gentle undulation stabbed with the occasional thorny bush or stunted acacia tree. There seemed to be more trees in the distance to our right, but they were a way away.
The pain in my leg had become an occasional hot spasm angling into my hip joint. I rubbed at it as we walked on, the landscape coming into focus. We were tracking a dry stream bed. It formed a rough path of sorts. The dirt, grey-black all night, had an orangey tinge to it in the morning sun. The kid in front’s trainers were covered in it. Detail crowded in. Everything was soon pin sharp. As the boy kicked up dust the wind tore it away.
Ahead, Mo stopped. The group concertinaed together as we all caught up. He’d paused us in a culvert. There was a lip of rock running alongside the stream bed here, no more than a metre high. Nevertheless, it was cover of sorts. We’d agreed that we would keep out of sight during the day, but I’d imagined we’d be able to hide away somewhere better than this. Amelia, thinking the same thing, said so.
‘The sun is up. Every minute we are in the open is a risk,’ said Mo.
‘Also, we’re exhausted,’ Xander agreed.
Amelia looked sceptical.
‘We’ve made progress,’ said Mo. ‘We’re on course to meet the river.’
‘I hope it has more water in it than this tributary
,’ said Amelia doubtfully.
‘We could push on just a little further, see if there’s somewhere a bit better to lay up,’ I suggested. ‘Those trees in the distance, for example.’
‘They’re quite a way.’
As Mo spoke, I spotted something moving over his shoulder. Too fast and smoothly for an animal, a pickup was coming steadily towards us, a great plume of dust shearing into the sky behind it.
‘Down!’ I shouted. Mo dropped to the ground and everyone else followed suit. We hunched there as the noise of the truck reached us. It was approaching at an angle, and at a constant speed. Since it wasn’t picking its way through scrub it had to be travelling along a track of some sort. In all this expanse, how had we wound up next to a road?
We were below the horizon line here but still, the truck was coming in roughly our direction. Were they making a beeline for us? I held my breath. We all did, I’m sure. Nobody moved a muscle as the truck rumbled our way.
51.
I have to admit the thought occurred to me, as we crouched there with bated breath, hoping the truck would pass us by, that the coincidence of us being so close to a track in all that vast emptiness almost seemed too much. I didn’t actually think Mo had led us here deliberately, and yet …
The engine got louder and louder. It seemed the truck was about to stop right alongside us. But it didn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to look up, just accepted the blissfully welcome realisation that it wasn’t stopping, that instead its engine noise was fading away.
‘Thank God for that,’ I said under my breath.
‘There’d be more point in thanking this ridge of rock,’ said Amelia, tapping the embankment with a finger. ‘Mo’s right. It does in fact shield us from view. Parallax can be helpful.’
‘What do we do now, though?’ asked Xander.
Mo had unscrewed the lid of a plastic bottle and held it out. ‘We wait. We rest, hidden, here. We gather our strength to move again later.’
Xander drank and passed the bottle on to me. The other kids, following Mo’s lead, put down the bags and made themselves comfortable. I handed the water bottle along to the little guy with the big trainers. He looked so small sitting in the dirt next to me.
My leg was still pulsing angrily but at least the pain was confined to my thigh now. The bite felt hot. I thought I ought to take a look at it so, using the excuse that I needed the toilet, I leopard-crawled along the gully, tucked myself in behind a boulder, and dropped my trousers.
I gulped at what I saw. I’d definitely been bitten – or stung – by something. A dark puncture dot swam in a pool of purple-yellow, beyond which the skin was an angry red, taut with swelling. No wonder it hurt. Whatever had bitten me couldn’t have been that venomous, otherwise I’d be dead, surely? Still, it hurt enough to make me worry the tissue might be damaged or even turn septic. Would I lose my leg?
‘No use worrying about that,’ I said under my breath. ‘And no use scaring the others. Just put up with it, like everything else.’
Talking to myself was daft and reassuring at the same time.
I relieved myself, thinking I might as well while I had the chance. Then I crawled back to the others. Later, I’d check the leg again. For now, I just willed it to feel better. I wasn’t the only person in pain. Addie was nursing his ankle, and another of the boys, who I now saw had walked through the night in flip-flops, had injured his left foot, prising the nail up off his big toe. It was encrusted with dirt and dried blood. He wasn’t complaining, just inspecting it.
‘Tough choice,’ said Amelia. ‘Obviously he should clean it up to prevent it becoming infected, but if he runs out of water he’ll be compromised.’
Ignoring her, Xander knelt next to the boy and dribbled a little from his own bottle onto the wound, motioning for him to dab at it with his shirt sleeve. ‘Morale is a thing,’ he said to nobody in particular.
Mo passed around some of the congealed slop he’d folded into a bit of plastic. I took a pinch, but I wasn’t actually that hungry. The dog eyed what I ate. We’d already given it the last morsel from the traps. I took off its tether: if it wanted to go in search of food, who was I to stop it? But the dog didn’t seem to want to leave. Instead it walked round in a circle a couple of times, lay down between me and Mo, and poked its nose under its curled tail.
‘We should do the same,’ I muttered. ‘Rest, as you say.’
Mo agreed. ‘One of us should keep watch though.’
I opened my mouth to offer but he’d already turned to one of his troop, a boy with symmetrical raised scar lines down each smooth cheek. With a nod this boy folded his arms across his knees and stayed put as Mo and the others stretched out in the shadow cast by the little escarpment. They did this as if sleeping on the bare earth in the bottom of a gully as the sun rose was entirely normal.
Xander gave a little shrug and followed suit. Instantly he was asleep. He’d kept going uncomplainingly but he was at his limit. Amelia was also spent. She looked gaunt in the harsh light and her hair was matted. But before she curled up on her side like the dog she whispered, ‘Your leg, how bad is it?’
‘What? It’s fine.’
‘For me a lie is less reassuring than the truth, always,’ she said.
‘Something nipped me. It hurt for a bit but it’s OK now.’
‘If you say so,’ she said.
‘Get some sleep,’ I said.
We both lay back. I covered my eyes with my arm and tried to blot everything out. But I couldn’t. I kept thinking about Mum. I had to get back to her, but was I making that more or less likely? We could die out here and nobody would know. Eventually those dark thoughts put me under. But within what felt like seconds – in fact, given the height of the sun, it must have been a couple of hours – something woke me up.
It was the dog growling beside me. I sat up straight and saw that the kid Mo had asked to keep watch was in a crumpled heap, mouth open, asleep. The dog rumble-growled again. That wasn’t the only noise, however. Within the rushing wind a tinny, bell-like clinking was coming from behind the outcrop.
I inched my head above it and sure enough I saw a goat nibbling at the scrub about thirty metres away. There was more than one. A herd of them were coming closer. And what was worse, they were accompanied. A lone goatherd trailed along behind them. He looked straight out of the Bible, with a crook, dark robe and headdress, but there was one odd detail in the scene: he was studying his mobile phone as he picked his way towards us.
The dog was still growling. He had also woken Mo, who clocked the approaching goatherd. The goats would walk on by us if they kept going straight. I put a hand on the back of the dog’s neck, intending to soothe it. But dogs aren’t daft and the hound was a clever one. He felt the fear my fingertips were transmitting. It was my fault, not his. No doubt he could smell the goats and their owner. I obviously thought they were a threat. So he, the dog, would see them off.
I should have hung on to him but I was too slow.
He leaped out of the gully and his growl burst into full-blooded barking.
52.
The dog’s barking didn’t scare the goatherd away. Far from it. His goats were rattled by the noise so he raised his head from his phone screen and headed over to investigate. Mo and I ducked down. I hoped in vain that the dog would ease up, but his barking just got louder.
The other kids were waking, confused by the noise, asking questions. Mo hushed them. I hissed an explanation to Xander and Amelia. The dog’s bellowing went up another notch. There could only be one reason: the goatherd had to be coming closer.
And he was. He was advancing all the way to the trench. I rummaged in my bag for the empty revolver. If he got as far as poking his head over the lip, I could at least wave the gun at him.
Mo held a finger to his lips. We all stayed stock still. And eventually the dog quietened, leaving just the wind noise laced with goat-bells. I let out a breath, inched my eyes above the embankment, and said, ‘What the …?!’
> The dog was still right there. But so was the goatherd. He was squatting next to the hound, stroking him. Noticing me, the goatherd stood up. I swear the dog looked at me sheepishly.
The goatherd’s face was all creases, his eyes weathered slits. They’d seen everything now. He came towards me, right to the edge of the embankment, and loomed above us all with his hands on his hips.
Mo started talking to the guy but he did not reply, just surveyed us without emotion. Mo tried again, in a different dialect I think, and got exactly the same response. He simply looked us over in turn. As his gaze took me in I realised I was still holding the revolver. He noticed but didn’t linger on it particularly. His expression said he came upon bunches of kids – including foreigners armed with ancient handguns – hidden away in the wind-ravaged scrubland most days.
Mo tried talking to the goatherd again, this time handing up a water bottle as he spoke. The guy tilted his head, declining the offer. He seemed to reach a conclusion. Whatever it was, it entailed him simply turning around and walking back to his goats.
We watched him go in silence. The dog looked from him to us and back to him again, and decided tagging along with the goatherd was the better bet. Given how at ease the man was in the environment compared to us, I reckon the dog made a good decision, but I was still sorry to see him go.
‘Phew,’ said Xander eventually. ‘Near miss.’
‘What do you mean?’ Amelia replied. ‘I’d call it a direct hit. He had a very good look at us.’
‘Yes, but he didn’t seem interested.’
Amelia jerked her thumb Mo’s way. He was looking worried. Amelia went on, ‘Mo reckons General Sir is known to everyone in these parts. That guy may have looked unbothered but he’s probably on the phone to him as we speak.’
It occurred to me, too late, that I could have taken his phone from him. I had a gun, after all. I could have used his phone to call for help. Who I’d have called exactly, other than Mum, I don’t know. The thought of speaking to her made my throat knot up. The guy’s phone obviously had a signal. How had I let the opportunity go? Should I run after him and make him hand it over?