After what seemed like only a few minutes, Luca woke again. He shifted his weight, the tree bark digging into his back. He could hear the sound of Bear breathing right beside him. She had moved round during the night and her face was only an inch away from his cheek.
Moving onto his side, he tried to get comfortable, his eyes seeking the dull fluorescent glow of his watch. It was just after 2 a.m. and they had been asleep for several hours. Shutting his eyes again, Luca tried to blank his mind for sleep when gradually he realised what had woken him. It was a noise, somewhere distant, as if on the other side of the jungle, but it was different from the other night sounds. It had a beat, steady and unrelenting, a bass note that pounded again and again and again. Luca stared into the darkness, trying to understand what it was he was hearing.
‘Bear,’ he whispered. ‘Wake up.’
He reached across, shaking her knee. ‘Hey, Bear, wake up.’ He felt her leg go stiff under his hand as she suddenly clicked out of sleep. She stayed absolutely still for a few seconds.
‘Putain! Shit!’ Bear hissed. ‘Come on. Come on. Quickly!’
Luca stayed where he was, trying to discern her silhouette in the darkness.
‘What the hell is going on? What is that?’
Bear was already on her feet, pulling her hair back from her face.
‘They’re drums, Luca.’
‘Drums?’
‘It’s the LRA. They’ve found our trail. Come on, we need to get moving. Now!’
Luca quickly got to his feet, his hand moving round to check he’d put his survival knife back in its sheath.
‘They can’t track us at night, for Christ’s sake. That’s impossible.’
‘You tell them that,’ Bear said, grabbing hold of his hand and hauling him forwards. Luca stumbled for a few paces, groping with one hand stretched out in front of him to protect his face. His fingers brushed against the thick foliage, the jungle alien to his touch. After a few seconds he stopped, and in the sudden silence they heard the slow beat of the drum once again.
‘Bear, this is crazy. I can’t even tell which direction we’re going.’
She was right behind him, her hand clasped in his to stop them from getting separated.
‘It doesn’t matter now. Just go in the opposite direction from the drums. We have to keep ahead of them until dawn.’
There was a pause before Luca squeezed her hand in his.
‘They won’t catch us. I promise you that.’
Chapter 18
AS THE FIRST light of dawn rose over the basin of the Ituri Forest, Luca and Bear came out into the open. Amongst the endless trees and bushes, they had suddenly stumbled upon a wide area of rock jutting out from the top of a small hill. Staggering into the middle of it, they stood marvelling at the openness of the sky above. It finally felt as if they had been released from the clutches of the forest, if only for a moment.
Bear sat down on the red rock, drawing her knees up to her chest. She stared out across the grey landscape, watching the colour slowly return as daylight poured across the horizon. She blinked, trying to stop her eyes from closing with exhaustion.
All night, they had heard the drums. At first they had been distant, the beat just drifting above the hum of the forest, and they had had to stand stock-still, holding their breath, to hear them clearly. But as the night drew on, the beat grew louder, pounding relentlessly.
They pushed harder, redoubling their efforts as the noise grew louder, but whatever they did and no matter how much they hurried, the drums were always there, gaining on them. Only an hour ago, they had even heard voices. The shouts were deep-pitched, almost grunts, followed by howls which rose together in some kind of savage chorus.
Luca stalked over to the edge of the rock, squinting into the distance.
‘We’ve got to figure out where the hell we are. And fast,’ he said. ‘That’s the river we crashed in. It’s got to be.’
Facing the rising sun, he got his bearings. ‘So, that means we’ve been heading mainly west since then.’
Bear tried to concentrate. Calculations that normally came to her instinctively seemed to jam in her brain, the tiredness making even the simplest sum seem impossibly difficult.
‘Come on,’ she muttered to herself, trying to picture the contours of the aerial chart. After a couple of seconds, she looked up. ‘We crashed seven and a half miles north, northeast of Epulu. That puts us exactly twelve miles from the nearest MONUC base. It should be about one hundred and sixty degrees from here, almost due south until we reach the other side of the river.’
‘Twelve miles?’ Luca asked, turning back from the view. Bear nodded, unable to meet his eye. They both knew that at the rate the LRA were gaining, they would be lucky to keep ahead of them for the rest of the morning, let alone cover twelve miles. With the words still hanging in the air, Luca reached out a hand to pull her to her feet.
Just as she stood up, they heard shouting again, the noise echoing out across the canopy, with parts of words even discernible above the beat of the drum.
‘You understand what they’re saying?’ Luca asked.
Bear nodded slowly.
‘What is it?’
‘I’m not going to translate that. You’d never want to hear what they are saying.’
Luca could see her shiver, her skin breaking out in goose-bumps across the top of her arms. As he went to pull her forward once again, he noticed a gap in the bushes on the opposite side of the clearing. Sprinting over, he crouched down on the ground. There were scuff marks across the edge of the rock. He stared deeper into the forest. It was definitely some kind of path.
‘Let’s go!’ he said, the energy returning to his limbs. Bear ran after him. She could see Luca twisting to left and right as the path wound through the bushes.
‘It’s a path!’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘A bloody path! There’ll be a village somewhere at the end of it.’
Bear struggled to keep up, raising her hand to fend off a swinging branch as it catapulted back towards her.
‘Luca!’ she called. ‘It’s an elephant track. They criss-cross through the forest.’
She ran full tilt, feeling her chest rise with the effort and the tiredness suddenly ebb away from the jolt of adrenalin. Just ahead of her, Luca had slowed slightly. They settled into a fast jog, running in unison, footfalls striking in time.
The minutes passed; ten, twenty and then thirty, with the pace not varying. Occasionally, they would have to jump over a fallen log, or weave sideways as the path turned around a vine-covered boulder, but Luca always kept them running. Bear could feel her shoulder ache with every swing of her arm and, as the initial thrill of the discovery faded, so too did the adrenalin.
‘Only elephants use this?’ Luca said over his shoulder.
Bear grunted in response, too breathless to answer. She knew her shoulder was slowing her down a little, but even so, she had never met anyone as unrelenting as Luca. He just seemed to go on and on, continually breaking trail and barely even stopping to drink water. She had always prided herself on keeping extremely fit, but she was nothing by comparison.
An hour into the run, Luca suddenly jolted to a halt. He crouched down, pulling at a string of woven hessian that had snagged on a thorn bush by their feet. It was the mouldy remains of a piece of netting, hand-woven, with the thread worn rough around the edges.
‘Someone’s been here,’ he said triumphantly. ‘And I bet the LRA don’t use this kind of stuff.’
Bear nodded, her nostrils flaring as she rested her hands on her hips.
‘It’s the … Maputi pygmies,’ she said, trying to catch her breath. ‘They net hunt along … these elephant tracks.’
‘Well, they must be close.’
‘Maybe. But that looks like it’s been there a while.’
‘OK. Let’s go.’
They had just settled into the jog once again when the path forked. There was a toe print clearly marked in the mud on the left-hand one and L
uca ran down it, ahead of Bear, to find himself in the middle of a small clearing with huts arranged in a semicircle under tall trees.
The huts were made of saplings bent round in a dome with broad, waxy leaves woven together and pinned through. Each hut was no more than chest height with entrances so small that a person would have to crawl on hands and knees just to squeeze through. Luca turned slowly, taking them in one by one while sunbeams pierced the canopy high above them, sending dappled light across the clearing.
‘Pygmies?’
‘Yeah,’ Bear said, walking over to one of the huts and crouching down to peer inside. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could see the crude frame of a bed made from carefully whittled branches, knotted together with vine. There were a couple of metal pots neatly stacked to one side and a small bag of grain, tied close. She pointed down to the charred remains of a fire.
‘This isn’t right. Some of these huts have got fresh leaves, meaning that they must have repaired them recently. But pygmies never let their fires go out.’ She stared at the other fires. The ash was dry and old. ‘And if they were on a big hunt for a few days somewhere deeper in the forest, they would have left some of the younger children behind with one of the elders.’
Digging her fingertips deep into the ash, she felt for any trace of heat. It had been dead for days.
‘There’s no one here.’
Luca pushed his hair back from his eyes and stared blankly at the entrance to one of the huts. A mixture of disbelief and despair welled up inside him. The sudden rush of optimism he had felt at finding the village had already been replaced by the terrible certainty that nothing had changed. The LRA were still tracking them, and whatever he and Bear did they were there, gaining on them minute by minute.
He felt his chest tighten, as if the run had taken the wind out of him, but he already knew it was nothing to do with the exercise. They were being hunted down like animals through the bush and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. He tried to think what to do, but the echo of the drums seemed to beat in his head, ceaselessly pounding. It was the drums. They were driving him mad.
‘You OK?’ Bear asked, seeing his ashen colour. Luca looked as if he was about throw up at any moment.
‘We’ll just have to keep running as best we can,’ he said flatly, hearing the hopelessness in his own voice. ‘It’s all we can do.’
Bear didn’t answer immediately, turning her back to him and staring out into the bush. After a couple of seconds she raised her hands, palms open. She tilted her head back and shouted.
‘Jambo! Tunaleta madawa kwenye kabila lenu.’ Hello! We bring medicine for your tribe.
She shouted it again, turning slowly while her eyes scanned across the wall of bushes, so dense it was impossible to see more than a few feet into them. Suddenly, straight in front of her, there was a rustle of branches and two boys simply stepped out into the open. They had been standing barely twenty feet away, absolutely motionless and perfectly concealed amongst the trees.
Both were naked except for knotted twine wrapped around their waists, which hung in a belt over their groin but left their buttocks bare. Their hair was shaved to the skin, while old white paint, cracked and faded around the edges, ran in a band across the tops of their arms and thighs in some kind of tribal marking. Each held a spear loosely in his right hand, with burn marks running down from the tip, while the second boy also had a bow and arrow hanging from a vine strap slung across his shoulder. A huge brown net, that had been carefully wound together, was balanced on the head of the nearest boy, its coils falling down his back to his waist.
‘Jambo,’ Bear said, her voice softening as she greeted the boys with a smile. It was hard to tell from their size, but she guessed both to be in their early teens. They stared at her, brown eyes wide, but not with fear or apprehension. They just stared, waiting.
‘Naitwa kina nani?’ What are your names?
The two boys exchanged glances before the first widened his stance and spoke. His voice was so soft it barely carried across the clearing.
‘Lanso,’ he whispered. He pointed with his spear to his brother. ‘Abasi.’
‘Na vijiji vyenu vingine viko wapi?’ And where is the rest of your village?
The boy’s voice dropped even lower.
“Yingi ni kwa moyo.’ Most are with the spirits.
‘Na wengine?’ And the others?
‘Ilienda kutoka hapa. Ni parefu.’ Gone from here. Long way.
Lanso blinked several times, before his gaze switched to Luca.
‘Tunawajua wazungu! Mwambie atupe dawa,’ Lanso said. We have seen white men before. Tell him to give us the medicine. ‘Kaka yangu anahitaji pia!’ My brother needs some.
‘Tutakupatia dawa sasa hivi,’ We shall get your medicine now, Bear replied.
‘You speak their dialect?’ Luca asked.
‘No, but a lot of the Maputies speak a kind of Swahili that’s pretty close to what I grew up with.’ She pushed back a loose strand of hair. ‘He told me the rest of the village is either dead or gone.’
‘So what happened to them? How come the boys are the only ones left?’
Bear turned back to them, speaking slowly while squatting down on her haunches, so that her head was just below the level of their chests. Lanso hesitated for several seconds, staring at her suspiciously, before taking a step closer. While Bear spoke, he seemed fascinated by her right eye where the loss of pigmentation had bleached the white speck across her iris.
After an exchange which seemed to go backwards and forwards for a couple of minutes, with Lanso getting bolder with each answer he gave, Bear turned back to Luca.
‘OK, he basically says that they are here because this is their village and they don’t have anywhere else to go. As for the rest of them, the men were taken some time ago. I don’t know how long ago because the Maputies only count up to seven, after that it’s just “a lot”. They followed the trail for a little while before they got scared and turned back.’
‘And the women and children?’
Bear exhaled heavily. ‘It doesn’t look good.’
‘You reckon this was the LRA?’
‘Who else?’
Luca glanced back at the entrance to the village. ‘We’re wasting too much time,’ he muttered, and when Bear went to speak further with the boys, motioned for her to be quiet. There was the drum again, the beat filtering through the tall trees and out across the clearing. As the boys caught the sound, they both went rigid.
‘We’ve got to get them to guide us out of here,’ Bear whispered, turning back to Lanso and gripping him by his shoulders. ‘Unajua kituo cha MONUC? Kituo cha wazungu kusini mwa ha.’ Do you know the MONUC base? The white man’s base south of here?
Luca shook his head. ‘We shouldn’t get them involved. We should just leave them and hope those bastards follow our tracks and not theirs.’
Bear stared up at him.
‘We’re not going to last another hour running like this! And these boys can show us a way out of this. What the hell are you talking about?’
‘We could get them killed, trying to help us.’
‘Are you crazy?’ she shouted, turning to confront him ‘If they can get us out of here, then we go for it. Period.’
‘Think about …’ Luca begun, but Bear raised her hand.
‘Assez!’ Enough, she shouted. ‘There’s no place for that bullshit out here. We survive. That’s it.’
Both Lanso and Abasi were frightened by the sudden change in the foreigners. Lanso suddenly reached up, yanking Bear’s hand to get her attention. He quickly muttered something in Swahili.
‘They want to show us a place to hide,’ she translated. ‘Morality doesn’t exist out here. You know as well as I do, it’s our only chance.’
Chapter 19
THEY SCRAMBLED DOWN a steep hill to where a stream bubbled through the undergrowth, brimming out into clear pools of water before widening again. Luca could see flashes of colour through th
e bushes as Bear followed Lanso, sprinting upstream as fast as they could go. Water splashed up over his trousers and seeped through the stitching of his leather boots. At least the stream would hide their tracks.
Abasi was moving fast, ducking and flexing as he pivoted around the bushes and branches. His body was lithe and quick, while his size meant that he could duck under low branches with just a simple dip of his head or shoulders. His bare toes made nothing of the slippery mud and rocks, while behind him Luca crashed through the undergrowth, catching himself on the thorn bushes. It was as much as he could do to keep up, let alone see where they were going. And it was only at the last second that he noticed Abasi jump out of the stream and on to an outcrop of rock.
The boy was staring intently at something. As Luca pulled up next to him, he tried to see what it was.
Then, he saw it. Fingers of an upturned hand poked through the scattering of leaves. They were curved unnaturally back on themselves with the wrists bound together with old rope twine. Just above the fingers, he could see the shape of an arm, then further up a bulge in the leaves where a head might have been.
Luca stared, transfixed by the body, then he realised there were more of them. The ground was covered in a twisted heap of limbs, the joints angular and tortured. Tens of bodies lay half-submerged in the mud and leaves. They faced in different directions as if carelessly discarded like so much rubbish. As he looked from one to the next, he saw a single hand clinging to the remains of a torn, once brightly coloured piece of fabric. It still clenched tight in death, the fingers pudgy, with tiny half-moon nails rimmed with dirt. It was a toddler who lay as he had died, clinging to the hem of his mother’s skirt.
‘Jesus,’ Luca breathed, feeling his stomach clench as he caught wind of the stench. Flies feasted on the decaying bodies.
He gently put his hand on Abasi’s shoulder.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he whispered. The boy stared at him, looking deep into Luca’s eyes, before grabbing his forearm and pulling him forward after the others.
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