by Wilbur Smith
Then her head burst out of the creaming foam. She had tucked her hat under her belt, and her hair had come down. It streamed over her face like a sheet of shining silk. She looked up at him and, incredulously, he saw that she was laughing. The sound of the waterfall smothered her voice, but he could read her lips: “Don’t be afraid. I’ll catch you.”
He guffawed with relief. “Saucy wench!” he shouted back, and returned to the bank where Bakkat was holding the horses. He led them out one at a time, Trueheart first because she was the most tractable. The mare had watched Louisa take the leap and she went readily enough. She landed with a tall splash. As soon as she came up she tried to head for the bank, but Louisa swam to her head and turned her downstream. When they reached the tail of the pool the bottom shelved and they were able to stand. Louisa waved up at Jim again to signal that they were all right. She had replaced her hat on her head.
Jim brought out the other horses. Crow and Lemon, the two mares, went over without any ado. The geldings Stag and Frost were more difficult, but in the end Jim forced them to take the plunge. As soon as they hit the water Zama swam to them and steered them downstream to where Louisa waited to hold them, belly deep in the middle of the river.
Drumfire had watched the other horses jump, and when his turn came he decided he wanted no part of such madness. In the middle of the stone weir, with turbulent waters booming around them, he staged a battle of wills with Jim. He reared and plunged, losing his footing, then regaining it, backing away and throwing his head around. Jim hung on as he was tossed about, reciting a string of insults and threats in a tone that was meant to sound endearing and soothing. “You demented creature, I’ll use you as lion bait.” In the end he managed to wrestle Drumfire’s head around into a position where he could make a flying mount. Once he was astride, he had the upper hand and he forced Drumfire to the edge, where the current did the rest. They went over together, and during the long drop Jim twisted free. If Drumfire had landed on top of him he would have been crushed, but he threw himself clear and as soon as Drumfire’s head broke the surface he was ready to seize a handful of his mane, and swim him down to where Louisa and the rest of the horses stood.
Bakkat alone was still at the top of the waterfall. He gave Jim a brief hand signal to urge him on downstream, then went back along the black rock stratum, for a second time scrutinizing the surface for any sign he might have overlooked.
Satisfied at last, he reached the point where the rest of the herd had crossed the black rock. There he worked the masking spell for blinding the enemy. He lifted his leather skirt and urinated, intermittently pinching off the stream between thumb and forefinger as he turned in a circle.
“Xhia, you murderer of innocent women, with this spell I close your eyes so you cannot see the sun above you at noon.” He let fly a mighty squirt.
“Xhia, beloved of the darkest spirits, with this spell I seal your ears so that you might not hear the trumpeting of wild elephants.” He farted with the effort of expelling the next spurt, jumped in the air and laughed.
“Xhia, you stranger to the customs and traditions of your own tribe, with this spell I seal your nostrils so that you might not even smell your own dung.”
His bladder empty, he unstoppered one of the duiker horns on his belt, shook out the grey powder and let it blow away on the breeze. “Xhia, you who are my enemy unto the death, I dull all your senses so that you will pass this place without divining the parting of the spoors.”
Then, at last, he lit a dried twig of the tong tree from his clay fire-pot and waved it over the spoor. “Xhia, you nameless filth and excrement, with this smoke I mask my spoor that you may not follow.”
Satisfied at last, he looked down the valley and, in the distance, saw Jim and the others leading the horses away, keeping to the middle of the fast-flowing stream. They would not leave the water until they reached the place he had picked out for them almost a league downstream. Bakkat watched them disappear round the bend of the river.
The horses and mules they were leaving behind as decoys were already spread out down the valley, grazing quietly. Bakkat followed them, picked out a horse and mounted it. In an unhurried manner, not alarming the herd, he gathered it up and began to move it away from the river, crossing the divide into the next steep valley.
He went on for another five days, an aimless meandering through the mountainous terrain, making no effort to hide the spoor. On the evening of the fifth day he strapped the hoofs of the dead rhebuck back-to-front on his own feet. Then he abandoned the herd of remaining horses and mules, and minced away imitating the gait and the length of stride of the living rhebuck. Once he was well clear he laid another magical spell to blind Xhia, in the unlikely event that his enemy had been able to unravel the spoor this far.
He was confident at last that Xhia would not find where the party had split on the rock, and that he would follow the more numerous, undisguised spoor of the herd. When he caught up with it, he would find a dead end.
Now, at last, he could circle back towards the riverine valley where he had parted from Jim and the others. When he reached it, he was not surprised to find that Jim had followed his instructions exactly. He had left the river on the rocky stretch of the bank that Bakkat had selected and doubled back towards the east. Bakkat followed, carefully wiping clean the light spoor the party had left. He used a broom made from a branch of the magical tong tree. When he was well clear of the river, he cast a third magical spell to confuse any pursuit, then followed at a faster pace. By this time he was almost ten days behind Jim, but he travelled so swiftly that even on foot he caught up with them four days later.
He smelt their campfire long before he reached it. He was pleased to find that, once they had eaten the evening meal, Jim had doused the fire under a heavy blanket of sand, then moved on in the dark to spend the night in another better-protected place.
Bakkat nodded his approval: only a fool sleeps beside his own campfire when he knows he may be followed. When he crept up to the camp he found Zama was the sentry. Bakkat bypassed him effortlessly, and when Jim woke in the first light of dawn he was sitting close beside him.
“Somoya, when you snore you shame the lions,” he greeted him.
When Jim recovered from the shock, he embraced him. “I swear to the Kulu Kulu, Bakkat, that you have grown even smaller since last I saw you. Soon I will be able to carry you in my pocket.”
Bakkat rode ahead on the gelding, Frost. He led them straight towards the cliff that blocked off the head of the valley like a mighty fortress. Jim pushed his hat to the back of his head and gazed up at the wall of rock.
“There is no way through.” He shook his head. High above them the vultures sailed across the rockface on wide wings, coming in to land on the ledges beside their bulky nests of sticks and twigs.
“Bakkat will find the way,” Louisa contradicted him. Already she had complete confidence and trust in the little Bushman. They shared not a single word of a common language, but in the evenings at the campfire the two often sat close together, communicating with hand signs and facial expressions, laughing at jokes that they both seemed to understand perfectly. Jim wondered how he could be jealous of Bakkat, but Louisa was not as at ease with him as she was with the Bushman.
They climbed on upwards, straight towards the solid wall of rock. Louisa had dropped back to ride with Zama, who was bringing up the two spare horses at the rear of the column. Zama had been her protector and constant companion during all the long, hard days of the flight from Keyser, while Jim had been occupied with guarding the back trail and keeping the pursuit at bay. They had developed a rapport too. Zama was teaching her the language of the forests, and as she had an ear for the language she was learning swiftly.
Jim had come to realize that Louisa possessed some quality that drew others to her. He tried to fathom what it was. He cast his mind back to their first encounter on the deck of the convict ship. For him the attraction had been immediate and compelling. He tr
ied to put it into words. Is it that she emanates a feeling of compassion and goodness? He was not sure. It seemed that she hid only from him behind the defensive armour he called her hedgehog prickles; to others she was open and friendly. It was confusing and at times he resented it. He wanted her to ride at his side, not with Zama.
She must have felt his gaze upon her for her head turned towards him. Even at that distance her eyes were an extraordinary blue. She smiled at him through the thin veil of dust kicked up by the hoofs of the horses.
Bakkat stopped half-way up the scree. “Wait for me here, Somoya,” he said.
“Where are you going, old friend?” Jim asked.
“I go to speak to my fathers, and take them a gift.”
“What gift?”
“Something to eat, and something pretty.” Bakkat opened the pouch on his belt and brought out a stick of eland chagga half the length of his thumb that he had been hoarding, and the dried wing of a sunbird. The iridescent feathers gleamed like emeralds and rubies. He dismounted and handed Frost’s reins to Jim. “I have to ask permission to enter the sacred places,” he explained, and disappeared among the proteas and sugar-bushes. Zama and Louisa came up and they unsaddled the horses and settled down to rest. Time passed and they were drowsing in the shade of the proteas when they heard the sound of a human voice, tiny with distance, but the echoes whispered along the cliff. Louisa scrambled to her feet and looked up the slope. “I told you Bakkat knew the way,” she cried.
High above them he stood at the base of the cliff, and waved to them to follow. They saddled up quickly, and climbed up to meet him.
“Look! Oh, look!” Louisa pointed to the vertical gash that split the rockface from the base of the cliff to the crest. “It is like a gateway, the entrance to a castle.”
Bakkat took Frost’s reins from Jim and led the horse into the dark opening. They dismounted and, leading their own horses, they followed him. The passage was so narrow that they were forced to walk in single file with their stirrup irons almost scraping the rock walls on each side. On both sides of them the glassy smooth stone seemed to reach to the strip of blue high above them. The sky was so remote that it appeared thin as the blade of a rapier. Zama drove the spare horses into the opening behind them but their hoofbeats were muffled by the floor of soft white sand. Their voices echoed weirdly in the confined spaces as the passage twisted and turned through the depths of the rock.
“Oh, look! Look!” Louisa cried, with delight, and pointed to the paintings that covered the walls from the sandy floor to her eye-level. “Who painted these? Surely they are not the work of men, but of fairies.”
The paintings depicted men and animals, herds of antelope that galloped wildly across the smooth stone, and dainty little men who pursued them with arrows nocked to their bows, ready to shoot. There were herds of giraffe, blotched with ochre and cream, long sinuous necks entwined like serpents. There were rhinoceros, dark and menacing, with nose horns longer than the little human hunters who surrounded them and fired arrows into them so that the red blood flowed and dribbled into pools beneath their hoofs. There were elephant, birds and snakes, all the profusion of creation.
“Who painted these, Bakkat?” Louisa asked again. Bakkat understood the sense of the question but not the language she spoke. He turned on Frost’s back and answered her in a rush of clicking words that sounded like snapping twigs.
“What does he say?” Louisa turned to Jim.
“They were painted by his tribe, by his fathers and grandfathers. They are the hunting dreams of his people—praise-pictures to the courage and beauty of the quarry and the cunning of the hunters.”
“It’s like a cathedral,” Louisa’s voice was hushed with awe.
“It is a cathedral,” Jim agreed. “It is one of the holy places of the San.”
The paintings covered the walls on both sides. Some must have been ancient, for the paint had faded and crumbled and other artists had painted over them, but the ghostly images of the ages blended together and formed a tapestry of infinity. They were silent at last, for the sound of their voices seemed sacrilegious in this place.
At last the rock opened ahead of them and they rode towards the narrow vertical blade of sunlight at the end of the passage. Then they emerged through the rock cleft and the sunlight dazzled them. They found themselves high above the world, with a vulture’s view across a vastness that left them silent and astonished. Great plains stretched away, dun and limitless, laced with veins of green where the rivers flowed, and dotted with patches of darker forest. Beyond the plains, almost at the reach of the eye, rose an infinity of hills, rank upon rank, like the serrated fangs of a monstrous shark, fading with distance, purple and blue, until they merged with the blue of the tall African sky.
Louisa had never imagined a sky so high or a land so wide, and gazed upon it with a rapt expression, silent until Jim could bear it no longer. This was his land and he wanted her to share it with him and love it the way he loved it.
“Is it not grand?”
“If I had never believed in God before, I would now,” she whispered.
They reached the Gariep river the next morning, at the point where it debouched from the mountains. Over the aeons its waters had cut this deep pass through the rock. The river was running wide and apple green with the thawing of the high snows.
After the mountains, the air here was warm and caressing. The banks of the river were lined with dense stands of sweet thorn and wild willows, carpeted with spring flowers. The saffron-plumed weaver birds were shrieking and fluttering as they wove their basket nests on to the drooping wands of the willows. Five kudu bulls were drinking at the water’s edge. They threw up their massive spiralled horns and stared with astonishment at the cavalcade of horses coming down the far bank to the ford. Then they fled into the sweet thorn with their horns laid back and water dripping from their muzzles.
Jim was the first across the river, and let out a hoot of triumph as he examined the deep tracks cut by steel-shod wheels into the soft earth of the opposite bank. “The wagons!” he shouted. “They passed through here less than a month ago!”
They rode on faster, Jim barely able to contain his eagerness. From a distance of many miles he picked out the single kopje that stood upon the plain ahead. A forest of camel-thorn trees surrounded the base of the hill, then the conical slopes rose steeply to a buttress of grey rock. This formed a plinth for the weird, wind-carved natural sculpture that surmounted it. It was the shape of a squatting bull baboon, with domed pate and low, beetling brows, his elongated muzzle pointed towards the north, staring out across the lion-coloured plain over which the springbuck herds drifted like puffs of cinnamon-coloured smoke.
Jim kicked his feet out of the stirrups and stood erect on Drumfire’s back. Through the lens of the telescope he swept the base of the distant kopje. He laughed with joy as he picked out a flash of white in the sunlight, like the sail of a tall ship seen from afar.
“The wagons! They are there, waiting for us.” He dropped into the saddle and as his backside slapped against the leather Drumfire jumped forward and bore him away at full gallop.
Tom Courtney was butchering the venison he had killed that morning. Under the wagon tent one of the servants was turning the handle, another feeding the strips of fresh meat into the sausage-making machine. Sarah was working at the nozzle from which the paste oozed, filling the long tubes of pig’s gut. Tom straightened up, glanced out across the veld and spotted the distant dustcloud raised by flying hoofs. He swept off his hat and used it to shade his eyes against the cruel white glare. “Rider!” he called to Sarah. “Coming fast.”
She looked up but kept the long coils of sausage running between her fingers. “Who is it?” she demanded. Of course, with a mother’s instinct, she knew who it was, but she did not want to jinx it by saying the name until she could see his face.
“It’s himself!” Tom cried. “Or if it is not, I will shave my beard. The little devil must have succe
eded in showing Keyser a clean pair of heels.”
For weeks they had waited, worried and tried to cheer each other, insisting that Jim was safe, while hope eroded with the passage of the long days. Now their relief and joy were unbounded.
Tom seized a bridle from the rack on the tailboard of the wagon and ran to one of the horses tethered in the shade. He slipped the bit between its jaws and tightened the cheek-strap. Scorning a saddle he went up on its bare back and galloped out to meet his son.
Jim saw him coming and rose in the stirrups, waving his hat over his head, hooting and bellowing like an escaped maniac. They raced towards each other and then as they came level, dismounted on the run, hurled by the momentum of their mounts into each other’s arms. They hugged each other, beat each other on the back and danced in a circle trying to swing each other off their feet. Tom ruffled Jim’s long hair and pulled and twisted his ears painfully.
“I should thrash you within an inch of your life, you little skellum,” he scolded. “You have given your mother and me the worst days of our lives.” He held him at arm’s length and glared at him lovingly. “I don’t know why we bothered. We should have let Keyser have you, and good riddance.” His voice choked, and he hugged Jim again. “Come on, boy! Your mother is waiting for you. I hope she gives you a royal slice of her tongue.”
Jim’s reunion with Sarah was less boisterous but if anything even more loving than it had been with his father. “We were so worried about you,” she said. “I thank God with all my heart for your deliverance.”
Then her first instinct was to feed him. Through mouthfuls of jam roly-poly and milk tart he gave his parents a colourful, if expurgated, account of his exploits since he had last seen them. He did not mention Louisa, and they were all aware of the omission.