by Wilbur Smith
In the morning Jim ordered the wagon to be towed well away from the laager so that Louisa could not hear Rashood on the wheel. They lashed him to the spokes, but Rashood broke down before Jim had ordered a single spin. “Pity, effendi. Enough, Somoya! I will tell you all you wish to know, only take me down from this accursed wheel.”
“You will stay on the wheel until you have answered all my questions straight and true. If you hesitate or lie, the wheel will turn. When did this creature Kadem murder the princess? Where did this happen? What of my uncle? Has he recovered? Where is my family now?”
Rashood answered each question as though his life depended on it. Which indeed it does, Jim thought grimly.
When he heard the whole story of how his family had fled from Good Hope in the two schooners, and that they had sailed north after leaving the Lagoon of the Elephants, Jim’s sorrow for Yasmini was tempered with relief and his anticipation of an imminent reunion.
“Now I know that we shall find my parents at Nativity Bay, and my uncle Dorian and Mansur with them. I count the days in my heart before I shall see them again. We must resume the journey again tomorrow at first light.”
Consumed with eagerness to reach Nativity Bay, Jim’s hopes and longings ran ahead of the slow procession of wagons and grazing herds. He wanted to leave the caravan to ride for the coast at once. He urged Louisa to accompany him, but Zama’s recovery from the bullet wound was slow. Louisa insisted that he still needed her care and she could not leave him.
“You go on ahead,” she told him. Even though he was sure she did not truly mean him to leave her, and that she expected him to refuse, he was sorely tempted to take her at her word. But then he recalled that Koots, Oudeman and the Arab assassin, Kadem, were still at large and might be in the offing. He could not leave Louisa alone. Each morning he and Bakkat rode out far ahead of the caravan to scout the road path, and he made certain that he returned before sunset each evening to be with Louisa.
They emerged from the bottom end of the narrow gorge into a country lush with grasslands and fair hills interspersed with green forests. Each day Bakkat found sign of the elephant herds but none fresh enough to follow up until the morning of the fifth day after leaving the gorge. As usual he was riding just ahead of Jim, breaking trail and scanning ahead for sign, when suddenly he turned Crow aside and reined him to a standstill. Jim came up beside him. “What is it?” Bakkat pointed wordlessly at the damp earth and the tracks deeply trodden into it. Jim felt his pulse jump with excitement. “Elephant!”
“Three big bulls,” Bakkat agreed, “and very fresh. They passed this way in the dawn of this very morning, not long since.” Jim felt his anxiety to reach Nativity Bay abate as he stared at the spoor. “They are very big,” he said.
“One is a king of all elephants,” Bakkat said. “It may be as large as the first great beast you slew.”
“They cannot be too far ahead of us,” Jim suggested hopefully. There had been many successful hunts since the battle with Manatasee’s impis on the river bank. Each time they caught up with the great ivory-bearing bulls Jim added to his fund of experience and knowledge of their habits. By now he had honed his skills as a hunter, and in so doing had become addicted to the dangers and the fascination of the chase after this most noble quarry.
“How long will it take to catch up with them?” he asked Bakkat.
“They are feeding as they go, moving slowly,” Bakkat pointed out the torn branches of the trees from which the bulls had fed, “and they are heading down towards the coast, along our own line of march. We need not detour to follow them.” Bakkat spat thoughtfully and looked up at the sky. He held up his right hand and measured his spread fingers against the angle of the sun. “If the gods of the hunt are kind, we might catch them before noon, and still be back at the wagons before nightfall.” These days Bakkat showed a reluctance equal to Jim’s to spend a night away from the wagons, and the golden charms of Letee.
Jim was torn. Despite his passion for the chase, his love and concern for Louisa were stronger. He knew that the vagaries of the hunt were unpredictable. To follow the bulls might add a day or more to the journey to the coast. They might not be able to return to the wagons before the onset of night. On the other hand there had been no sign of Koots and his Arab ally since that disastrous night attack. Bakkat had swept the back trail for many leagues and it was clear. There seemed no longer to be a threat from that direction. Even so, dare he leave Louisa for so long?
He wanted desperately to follow the tracks. In the months of hunting he had learned to read the spoor so vividly that he could picture them in his mind’s eye, and he knew that these were magnificent bulls. He vacillated for a while longer while Bakkat squatted patiently beside the huge oval pad marks, and waited for him to make up his mind.
Then Jim thought of the small army of men who were with the wagons, to guard and protect Louisa. Koots’s force had been routed and decimated. Surely he would not return so soon. At last he convinced himself that Koots was heading either for Portuguese or Omani territory, that he would not double back to attack them again.
“Every minute I dither here the bulls are walking away from me.” He made up his mind. “Bakkat, take the spoor, and eat the wind.”
They rode hard and closed the gap swiftly. The spoor headed steadily through the low hills and forest towards the coast. In places the raw trunks of the trees from which the elephant had stripped the bark shone like mirrors a cable’s length ahead of them and they could push Drumfire and Crow into a canter. A little before noon they came upon a huge mound of spongy yellow dung, composed mostly of half-digested bark. It was lying in a puddle of urine that had not yet soaked away into the earth. The dung was covered by a swarm of butterflies with gorgeous white, yellow and orange wings.
Bakkat dismounted and thrust his bare toe into the moist pile to test the temperature. The butterflies rose around him in a cloud. “The dung is still hot from his belly.” He grinned up at Jim. “If you called his name the bull is so close he would hear your voice.”
The words were no sooner out of Bakkat’s mouth than they both froze and their heads turned together. “Ha!” Jim grunted. “He heard you speak.”
In the forest not far ahead the elephant trumpeted again, high and clear as a bugle blast. Agile as a cricket Bakkat sprang into the saddle.
“What has alarmed them?” Jim asked, as he drew his big German four-to-the-pound gun from its sheath under his knee. “Why did he trumpet? Did he catch our wind?”
“The wind is in our faces,” Bakkat replied. “They have not smelt us, but something else has done it.”
“Sweet Mary!” Jim shouted with astonishment. “That is musket fire!”
The heavy reports of the guns boomed out and the echoes were flung back by the surrounding hills.
“Is it Koots?” Jim demanded, then answered himself, “It cannot be. Koots would never give himself away while he knows we’re close. These are strangers, and they are attacking our herd.” Jim felt a flare of anger: these were his elephant—the interlopers had no right to intervene in his hunt. He felt a strong urge to rush forward, but he quelled that dangerous inclination. He did not know who these other hunters might be. Judging by the fusillade of gunfire he knew that there was more than one. Any stranger in the wilderness might be a deadly threat. Suddenly there was another sound, the crackle of breaking branches and the rush of an enormous body bearing down on them through the thick underbrush ahead.
“Be ready, Somoya!” Bakkat called urgently. “They have driven one of the bulls back towards us. He may be wounded and dangerous.”
Jim had only time enough to swing Drumfire to face the sound, when the green forest wall ahead burst open and a bull elephant was upon him at full charge. In that moment of sudden danger, time seemed to slow as though he were caught in the coils of a nightmare. He saw curved tusks that seemed as massive as the main beams of a cathedral roof high above him, and the ears spread wide as the mainsail of a man-o’-war,
tattered by shot after a close-fought battle. There was fresh blood smeared down the elephant’s flank and fury in his tiny, gleaming eyes as they fastened on Jim.
Bakkat had guessed correctly: the gigantic animal was wounded and enraged. Jim realized that flight would be fatal, for Drumfire would not be able to use his speed in the confines of the thorn underbrush while the bull would crash through it without check. Jim could not fire from the saddle. Drumfire was dancing in a circle under him and tossing his head. His antics would upset Jim’s aim. Holding the heavy gun high above his head so that it would not hit him in the face as he landed, Jim threw one leg back over the cantle of the saddle and dropped to the ground, landing like a cat facing the charge.
He cocked the gun as his feet touched the earth. His fear was gone in that instant, replaced by a strange feeling of detachment, as though he stood outside himself and watched the gun come up.
Without conscious thought he knew that if he sent a ball through the beast’s heart its stride would not even check. It would still rip him limb from limb as effortlessly as a butcher dismembers a chicken carcass, then walk another mile before it succumbed.
After his first near-fatal experience with the head shot, Jim had spent hours and days carefully dissecting and studying the skulls of all the other elephant he had killed since then. Now he could visualize the exact location of the brain in the massive casket of the skull as though it was not solid bone but clear glass. As the butt-stock came into his shoulder he seemed not to see the iron sights of the weapon, but he looked through them to his tiny concealed target.
The shot thundered out. He was instantly blinded by the dense fog of gunsmoke, and driven back on his heels by the recoil. Then, out of the smoke bank, a grey avalanche toppled down on him. He was struck by an enormous slack weight.
The heavy gun was wrenched from his grip and he was hurled backwards. He rolled twice head over heels until he hit a low bush, which brought him up short. He struggled up just as the light breeze blew aside the curtains of silver gunsmoke, and saw the bull elephant kneeling before him on its front legs with the curve of the huge tusks resting on the earth and the tips pointing up to the sky. It seemed to be in an attitude of submission, like a trained elephant waiting to be mounted by a mahout. It was as still and motionless as a granite boulder. There was a round dark hole between its eyes. It was so close that he reached up and thrust his forefinger full length into it. The pewter-hardened ball, a quarter of a pound in weight, had cleaved the massive frontal bones of the skull and driven into the brain. When he withdrew his finger it was smeared with custard-yellow brain tissue.
Jim stood up and leaned heavily on one of the tusks. Now that the danger was past his breathing came hard and ragged, and his legs shook under him so that they could scarcely bear his weight. While he clung to the great curve of ivory and swayed on his feet Bakkat rode in and seized Drumfire before he could bolt. He brought him back to Jim and handed him the reins.
“My teaching begins to bear fruit.” He giggled. “Now you must give thanks and respect to your quarry.”
It was some minutes before Jim could gather himself to complete the ancient ritual of the hunt. Under Bakkat’s approving eye he broke off a leafy twig of the sweet thorn and placed it between the bull’s lips. “Eat your last meal to sustain you on the journey to the shadow land. Take with you my respect,” he said. Then he cut off the tail like his father before him. Jim had not forgotten the other musket shots he had heard. But as he stooped to retrieve his fallen musket, he noticed again the thick coating of blood down the bull’s flank, and saw a bullet wound in its right shoulder.
“Bakkat, this animal has been wounded before my shot,” he called sharply. Before Bakkat could reply another human voice close at hand shouted a challenge or a question. It was so unexpected, yet so familiar, that Jim stood with the empty gun in his hand and gaped at the tall athletic figure striding towards him through the undergrowth. A white man, dressed in European-style breeches and jacket, boots and a wide-brimmed straw hat.
“Hey there, fellow. What the devil do you think you’re playing at? I drew first blood. The kill is mine.” The voice rang as joyously as church bells in Jim’s ears. Under the brim of the hat the interloper’s beard curled red and wild as a bush fire.
Jim recovered his wits at once and shouted back just as belligerently, “By God, you saucy knave!” It required an effort to keep the laughter out of his tone. “You will have to fight me for it, and I will crack your pate as I have done fifty times before.”
The saucy knave stopped dead in his tracks and stared at Jim, then let out a wild hurrah and rushed at him. Jim dropped his musket and charged headlong to meet him. They came together with a violence that rattled their teeth.
“Jim! Oh, what joy! I thought we would never find you.”
“Mansur! I hardly recognized you with that fluffy bush sprouting all over your face. Where in the name of the devil have you been?”
They gabbled incoherently as they hugged and buffeted each other, and tried to pull handfuls of hair from each other’s heads and faces. Bakkat watched them, shaking his head and slapping his sides with amusement.
“And you, you little hooligan!” Mansur seized him, lifted him off his feet and tucked him under his arm, then embraced Jim again. It took some time for them to begin to behave like sensible persons, but gradually they got themselves under a semblance of control. Mansur replaced Bakkat on his feet, and Jim released Mansur from the head-lock in which he had pinned him.
They sat shoulder to shoulder, leaning against the dead elephant’s side in the shadow cast by the massive carcass and talked, cutting in on each other, hardly waiting for the reply to one question before asking another. Every now and then Mansur would tug at Jim’s beard and Jim would punch him affectionately in the chest or slap his hairy cheek. Though neither mentioned it, each of them was amazed at the changes that had taken place in the other during the time they had been apart. They had become men.
Then the retinue who had accompanied Mansur came looking for him. They were all servants from High Weald or sailors from the schooners. They were astonished to find Jim with their master. After Jim greeted them affectionately, he set them to work under the supervision of Bakkat to cut out the tusks from the fallen bull. Then he and Mansur could continue their exchange of news, trying to cover in minutes all that had overtaken them and the family since their last meeting nearly two years ago.
“Where is Louisa, the girl you ran off with? Did she have the sense to send you packing?” Mansur demanded.
“By God, coz, I tell you that is a pearl of a lass. Presently I’ll take you back to the wagons to be properly introduced to her. You will not credit your eyes when you see her, how lovely she has grown.” Then Jim broke off and his expression changed. “I know not how best to tell you, coz, but only a few weeks past I fell in with a deserter from the Gift of Allah. You must remember the rogue. His name is Rashood. He had a strange and terrible tale to tell, once I could drag it out of him.”
The colour drained from Mansur’s face and for a minute he could not speak. Then he blurted out, “He must have been in the company of two other of our sailors, all three deserters, and there would have been a strange Arab with them.”
“One named Kadem ibn Abubaker al-Jurf.”
Mansur started up. “Where is he? He murdered my mother, and almost killed my father.”
“I know it. I forced the whole story from Rashood.” Jim tried to calm him. “My heart breaks for you. I loved Aunt Yassie almost as much as you did. But the assassin has escaped.”
“Tell me all of it,” Mansur demanded. “Spare me not a single detail.”
There was so much to tell, and they sat so long telling it that the sun was low on the horizon before Jim stood up. “We must get back to the wagons before nightfall. Louisa will be beside herself.”
Louisa had hung lighted lanterns in the trees to guide Jim home, and she rushed out of the wagon where she and Intepe were nurs
ing Zama as soon as she heard the horses. At last she broke from Jim’s embrace when she became aware that a stranger was with him, watching their uninhibited display of affection for each other.
“There is someone with you?” She tucked the loose strands of her silky hair under her bonnet, and straightened her clothing, which Jim had rumpled.
“’Tis no one of consequence,” Jim assured her. “’Tis only my cousin Mansur, of whom I have spoken and whom you have seen before. Mansur, this is Louisa Leuven. She and I are affianced.”
“I thought you had over-extolled her virtues,” Mansur bowed to Louisa, then stared at her face in the lantern-light, “but she is more lovely than you warned me.”
“Jim has told me much about you,” Louisa said shyly. “He loves you better than a brother. When we saw each other before, on the deck of Het Gelukkige Meeuw, there was no opportunity for me to know you better. I hope that in the future we will be able to put that to rights.”
Louisa fed the two men, but as soon as they had eaten she left them to talk without interruption far into the night. It was after midnight when Jim came to join her in the wide cardell bed. “Forgive me, Hedgehog, that I have neglected you this evening.”
“I would have it no other way, for I know what he means to you and how close you are to each other,” she whispered, as she held out her arms to him. “But now is my time to be closer still.”
They were all astir before sunrise. While Louisa supervised the preparation of a celebratory breakfast to welcome Mansur to the laager, Mansur was at Zama’s bedside. Jim joined them, and all three chatted and reminisced. Zama was so much encouraged by Mansur’s arrival that he declared he was ready to leave his sickbed.
Smallboy and Muntu inspanned the wagons, and the caravan moved off. Louisa relinquished care of Zama to Intepe, and for the first time since Zama’s wounding she saddled Trueheart and rode out with Jim and Mansur. They passed through the herds of cattle and Mansur was amazed by their numbers and by the weight of the ivory they carried on the pack-saddles strapped to their backs.