A Time to Die c-13

by Wilbur Smith

  When she blew through this one, a tiny cork of dirt flew out of the end like a bl e and then it was hollow and clear. She flopped onto herobUZe and sat in the middle of the dirt floor with the straw still stuck in her mouth, laughing around it in triumph. Her sense of elation and achievement dispelled the Corroding sense of despair that had almost destroyed her will to keep on living.

  She crawled to the corner and carefully hid the precious straw.

  Then, for the rest of that day, she planned how she would use it.

  The rays of sun no longer penetrated to her cell, and the heavy gloom of evening was on her before she heard the wardress at the door. She huddled in her corner when the sergeant stooped into the cell, carelessly dumped the stodgy lump of boiled maize meal into the dirt, and stood the metal billy beside it.

  She leaned expectantly against the doorjamb and waited for Claudia to scramble for the food and drink like an animal on all fours. Claudia crouched motionlessly in the furthest corner of the cell and tried to show no expression, but her throat contracted in an involuntary swallowing reflex and her thirst was a raging beast within her.

  After she had not moved for a few minutes, the sergeant said something irritable in Portuguese and gestured to the hilly. With an immense effort Claudia prevented herself from looking down at it. The woman shrugged. Once again she stepped onto the maize cake and ground it into the dirt. She gave a snort of unconvincing laughter and backed out through the door, dragging it shut behind her, but left the billy can standing at the threshold.

  Claudia forced herself to wait until she was certain the wardress had truly left and was not watching her through a spy hole. Once she was sure she was not observed, Claudia crawled in frantic haste to the corner where she had hidden the straw and picked it up between her lips.

  Still on her knees, she crossed to the billy can and stooped over it.

  She drew the first mouthful through the straw and let it trickle down her throat, closing her eyes with pleasure. It was as though she were drinking down a magic potion. She felt new strength and resolve flow through her veins.

  She drank most of the contents of the billy can drawing out the pleasure of it until it was almost totally dark in the cell, but she could not bring herself to eat the sticky mess of maize cake smeared into the dirt.

  She hoarded the remains of the water, taking the wire handle of the billy can between her teeth and carefully moving it to the far corner of the cell where she could ration herself to small sips during the long hours ahead. She settled down for the night feeling almost cheerful and a little light-headed, as though she had been drinking champagne rather than plain unbolted river water.

  I can endure anything they do to me she whispered to herself. They aren't going to break me. I won't let them. I won't."

  Her mood did not last. Almost as soon as it was fully dark in the cell, she realized her terrible mistake in leaving the uneaten maize cake on the floor. Last night there had been only one rat, and it had fled when she screamed at it. This night the odor of food brought them pouring through the gaps in the roof. To her frenzied imagination, it seemed as though the floor of the cell was swarming with furry bodies. The smell of them clogged her nostrils, the nauseating ratty smell like boiling horns and hooves in a glue pot. She cowered in her corner, shivering with cold and horror, and they brushed against her legs and scurried over her feet, squeaking and squealing as they fought for the scraps of spilled porridge.

  At last Claudia succumbed to panic. Screaming, on the edge of hysteria, she kicked out at them wildly; one of them whipped around and bit her naked ankle; the sharp little teeth were like a razor cut. She screamed again and kicked, trying to dislodge it, but for a few dreadful seconds its curved teeth were buried in her flesh.

  At last she sent it flying into the darkness.

  The rat hit the billy can containing her treasured water, and she heard the metal clank against the wall and the liquid splash onto the earthen floor. She crawled to the overturned container and wept with despair.

  After long hours of horror and dark terror, the rats consumed the last of the maize and disappeared back through the roof.

  Claudia sank to her knees, exhausted both physically and emotionally.

  "Please God, let it end. I can't go on."

  She toppled over on her side and lay in the dirt, shivering and sobbing softly to herself, and at last dropped into the dark void of oblivion.

  She woke with something tugging at her hair and a strange grinding sound very close to her ear. Still groggy with sleep, it took her long seconds to realize what was happening to her. She had slumped over sideways, and one cheek was pressed to the dirt floor. She lay for a moment, enduring the sharp pulls on her hair and the grinding crunching in her uppermost ear, and then the terror came back to her in full force.

  A rat was chewing off her hair, cutting it with those sharp curved incisors, gathering it for nesting material. So great was her horror that it paralyzed her. She could not move. Her whole body tingled, her stomach knotted with cramps, and her toes and fingers curled with the strength of revulsion.

  Suddenly she w4 no longer terrified. Her fear changed to anger.

  In one lithe movement she rolled to her feet and began to hunt the loathsome creature.

  Relentlessly she pursued it around the cell, following it only by sound, the tiny scratch and patter of its feet. She no longer kicked out wildly but deliberately aimed each blow at the sound. Twice the creature tried to climb to safety, but each time Claudia heard it and used her whole body to sweep it from the wall and knock it back to the floor.

  This killing anger was an emotion she had never experienced before. It heightened all her senses; it rendered her hearing so acute could visualize each movement of her prey; it quickened that she her physical responses so her kicks were fast and powerful, and when one of them landed on the warm furry body, the shrill squeal of pain and fear from the rat inflamed her.

  She cornered it against the door of the cell and again stamped on it. She felt the small bones break under her heel, and she stamped again and again, sobbing with the effort, keeping it up until the carcass was soft and mushy under her feet.

  When at last she backed away and sank down in her corner, she was still trembling, but no longer with terror.

  "I've never )9 killed anything before, she thought, amazed at herself and this secret savage side to her nature that she had never suspected existed.

  She waited for a feeling of guilt and disgust to overwhelm her.

  Instead she felt as strong as though she had come through some ordeal that had armed her and equipped her to overcome whatever dangers and hardships lay ahead.

  "I'm not going to give in, not ever again," she whispered. "I'm.

  going to fight and to kill if I have to. I'm going to survive.

  In the morning when the wardress came for the billy can Claudia confronted her resolutely, thrusting her face only inches from the black woman's and keeping her voice measured but firm.

  "Take this out." She indicated the rat's carcass with her foot.

  The woman hesitated and Claudia said, "Do it no w!" The wardress picked up the mangled carcass by the tip of the tail and glanced back at Claudia with a measure of respect in her dark eyes.

  Carrying the empty billy and the dead rat, she left the cell. len she returned a few minutes later with the refilled billy can and the bowl of maize meal, Claudia subdued her thirst and maintained her new attitude of calm authority as she indicated the sewage bucket.

  "That has to be cleaned, she said. The woman snapped a retort in Portuguese.

  "I'll do it." Claudia did not waver but held the other woman's gaze until she broke the eye contact. Only then did she turn her back and offer her manacled hands to the wardress.

  "Undo these," she ordered. Obediently the wardress unclipped the key from her webbing belt.

  Claudia almost cried out as the handcuffs came away. The blood rushed back to her hands, and she held them to her ches
t and inst the pain, horrified massaged them tenderly, biting her lips ago by the condition of her swollen hands and torn, bruised wrists.

  The wardress prodded her in the small of the back and gave an order in Portuguese. Claudia took up the handle of the sewage bucket and, brushing past the woman, climbed the stairs. The sunlight and warmth and clean dry air were like a benediction.

  Claudia looked around the stockade quickly. It was obviously a women s prison, for a few dispirited feminine figurer, lolled in the dust beneath the single ebony tree in the center. They were in ragged loincloths. Their naked upper bodies were so painfully thin the ribs stood out clearly beneath the dusty dark skin, and their breasts, even those of the younger women, were empty and dangled as loosely as the ears of a spaniel. Claudia wondered what their crimes had been or if their mere existence had caused their captors offense.

  She saw that her bunker was only one of a row of a dozen or so.

  It was obvious these were reserved for the more important or dangerous prisoners.

  The gates of the stockade were guarded by a pair of burly black females dressed in the usual tiger stripes and toting AK assault rifles. They peered curiously at Claudia and discussed her with Dilation. Beyond the gates, Claudia had a glimpse of the broad green flow of the Pungwe River and for a moment entertained fanciful visions of plunging into it to bathe her battered body and wash her filthy clothes. But the wardress prodded her painfully in the back and urged her toward the screened latrines at the rear of the stockade.

  When they reached them, the wardress made hand signals for Claudia to empty her bucket into the communal pit, then turned away to chat with one of the other war dresses who had sauntered across to join them, AK-47 rifle over her shoulder.

  The back wall of the latrine was also the rear wall of the stockade. However, it offered no avenue of escape. The poles were as thick as her leg, lashed securely together with bark rope, and their tops were several feet higher than she could reach.

  She abandoned the idea of escape before it was fully formed and tipped the contents of the bucket into the deep pit. Immediately a humming cloud of des rose from the depths and circled her head.

  Wrinkling her nose with disgust, Claudia was backing toward the exit when a soft whistle stopped her dead. It was a low-pitched, mournful note, so unobtrusive she would have ignored it completely if she had not heard it so often before. It was one of the clandestine signals Sean and his trackers used. Sean had told her once that it was the call of a bird called a boubou shrike, and because of its associations rather than its pitch it electrified her.

  She glanced quickly toward the screened entrance to the latrine, but it was safe. She heard the voices of the wardress and her colleague still chatthig outside, and she pursed her lips and tried a soft, unconvincing imitation of the whistle.

  Instantly it was repeated from just beyond the back wall of the latrine, and Claudia's hopes soared. She dropped the bucket and ran to the wall of poles, putting her eye to one of the larger chinks.

  She almost screamed when an eye looked back at her from only the thickness of the poles and then a voice, a well-remembered voice, whispered, "Jambo, memsahib."

  "Matatu," she gasped.

  "Silly little bugger." Matatu gave her the only words of English he knew, and she had to fight to prevent herself bursting out in laughter of relief and hope and amusement at the incongruity of that greeting.

  "Oh Matatu, I love you," she blurted out, and a folded scrap of paper was thrust through the chink into her face. The instant her fingers closed on it, Matatu's eye was snatched away from the peephole as though on a fishing line.

  "Matatul" she whispered desperately, but he was gone. She had spoken too loudly, and she heard the wardress call out and her footsteps at the entrance.

  Claudia spun around and with the same movement crouched over the reeking pit. The wardress looked around the thatched screen and Claudia mapped at her furiously, "Get out, can't you see I'm busyr" The woman jerked her head back. Claudia was trembling with excitement as she unfolded the note and recognized the handwriting, and at the same time she was stricken with terror that it would be taken from her before she could read it. She refolded it quickly and slipped it deeply into the back pocket of her trousers, where she would be able to retrieve it even with her hands cuffed behind her.

  Now she was eager to return to the privacy of her cell. The wardress pushed her down the stairs, but without the viciousness of before.

  Claudia replaced the sewage bucket in the corner, and when the wardress pointed at her wrists, she held them out obediently. TIM touch of the metal on her abraded and bruised skin seemed even more galling than it had been before. The muscles and tendons of her upper arms and shoulders knotted in protest.

  Once Claudia was manacled the wardress seemed to recapture her harsh mood of authority. She tipped the contents of the maize bowl onto the 1loor and lifted her boot to grind it into the dirL Claudia flew at her. "Don't you dare!" she hissed, thrusting her face close to the woman's and glaring into her eyes so viciously that she recoiled involuntarily.

  "Get out!" Claudia told her. "Allez! Vamoose!" The wardress backed out of the cell with a muttered but unconvincing show of defiance and dragged the door closed behind her.

  Claudia was amazed at her own courage. She leaned against the door, trembling with the effort that the contest of wills had cost her, only then realizing the risk she had taken-she could have been brutally beaten or deprived altogether of her precious supply of water.

  It was Sean's letter that had given her the strength and bravado to defy the wardress. Leaning against the door, she reached back into her pocket and touched the scrap of folded notepaper, merely to reassure herself that it was safe. She would not read it yet. She wanted to delay and savor that pleasure. Instead she retrieved her drinking straw from its biding place.

  After she had drunk from the billy, she ate the maize cake, delicately picking it out of the dirt with her teeth and trying to shake loose the earth and dirt that clung to the sticky lumps of porridge. She was determined not to leave a scrap of it, not only because she was hungry but because she knew she would have need of all her strength in the days ahead, and also because she had learned that food scraps attracted the rats. Only when she had eaten and drunk did she allow herself the luxurious pleasure of reading Sean's note.

  She took it out of her pocket and carefully smoothed it between her swollen fingers. Then she squatted and placed it in the beam of sunlight that fell in a corner of the cell. At last she turned and knelt over it.

  She read slowly, moving her lips like a semiliterate, forming every word he had written as though she could taste it on her tongue.

  "Be strong, it won,"I-be for much longer and remember I love u. Whatever happeds, I love you." Her vision swam with tears YO as she read his la,stVords. Then she sat back and whispered softly, "I'll be strong. I promise you I'll be strong for you, and I love you too. With my very existence, I love you."

  "They may fight like women," said Sergeant Alphonso as he surveyed the piles of captured Zimbabwean Army equipment, "but at least they dress like warriors."

  The uniforms had been supplied by Britain as part of its aid commitment to Mugabe after the capitulation of Ian Smith's white regime. They were of the finest quality, and Alphonso and his men stripped off their old faded and patched tiger-striped battle dress with alacrity. In particular they were delighted with the gleaming black leather paratrooper boots with which they replaced their eclectic collection of tattered joggers and grubby tennis shoes.