Blue Horizon c-3

by Wilbur Smith

  "Do not treat me like a child," she told him, but the reprimand lacked fire and she smiled at him as she limped to the cooking fire. He did not argue. It was a gorgeous morning, bright and cool, and this put them both in a sunny mood. They ate under the trees to the sound of birdsong from the branches above them, and the meal became a small celebration of the previous day's events. With animation they discussed every detail of the hunt and relived all the excitement and terror, but neither mentioned the events of the night, although they were uppermost in their minds.

  "Now I must go back to the carcass to remove the tusks. It is not a task I can leave to others. A careless slip of the axe will damage the ivory irrevocably," he told her, as he mopped his plate with a piece of unleavened pot bread. "I will rest Drumfire today, he worked hard yesterday, and I will take Crow. Trueheart will stay in camp, for she is as lame as you are."

  Then I shall ride Stag," she said. "It will not take me long to don my boots." Stag was a strong but gentle gelding they had taken from Colonel Keyser.

  "You should stay in camp to recuperate fully."

  "I must go with you to retrieve my rifle, which I dropped in the thorn thickets."

  "That is a feeble pretext. I can do that for you."

  "You do not truly believe that I shall not attend the removal of the tusks for which we risked our very lives?"

  He opened his mouth to protest, but saw from her expression that it would be wasted effort. "I shall tell Bakkat to saddle Stag."

  There were two traditional methods of withdrawing the tusks. The carcass could be left to decompose, and when the cartilage that held the tusks in their sockets had softened and disintegrated they could be pulled forcibly from the skull. This was a lengthy and malodorous business, and Jim was impatient to see his trophies revealed in all their magnificence. So was Louisa.

  When they rode back they found a canopy of circling carrion birds darkening the sky above the body of the dead bull. In this vast assembly there was every species of vulture and eagle, as well as the undertaker storks with their monstrous beaks and bald pink heads, which seemed to have been parboiled. The branches of the trees around the dead bull groaned under the weight of this feathered horde. As Jim and Louisa rode up to the carcass, packs of hyena slunk away, and little red jackals peered at them from the cover of the thorn bushes with pricked ears and bright eyes. These scavengers had picked out the eyes of the bull and burrowed in through his anus, but they had not been able to tear open the tough grey hide to reach the flesh. Where the vultures had perched upon the carcass their excrement had left white stains down its sides. Jim felt a sense of outrage at this desecration of such a noble beast. Angrily he drew his rifle from its sheath and fired at one of the black vultures on the top branches of the nearest tree. Struck squarely by the leaden ball, the hideous bird came tumbling down in a welter of feathers and flapping wings. The rest of the roosting flock rose and climbed to join their peers in the sky above.

  When Louisa retrieved her rifle, she found that the woodwork was only lightly scratched. She came back and selected a vantage-point in the shade. Seated on a saddle blanket she sketched the proceedings, and made notes in the margins of the page.

  Jim's first task was to sever the bull's immense head from the neck. This had to be done to make it easier to handle it would have taken fifty men or more to roll the massive carcass from one side to the other. As it was, the decapitation took half the morning. Stripped to the waist the men were sweating in the noonday sun before it was accomplished.

  Then came the painstaking work of removing the skin and chipping away the bone from around the roots of the tusks, with meticulous axe strokes. Jim, Bakkat and Zama took turns, not trusting the clumsy touch or the wagon drivers and servants on the precious ivory. First one and then the other tusk was lifted out of its bony canal and laid upon a mattress of cut grass. With quick strokes of her brush Louisa recorded

  the moment when Jim stooped over the tusks and, with the point of his knife, freed the long cone-shaped nerve from the hollow butt end of each one. They slithered out, white and glutinous as jelly.

  They wrapped the tusks in cushions of cut grass, loaded them on to the backs of the pack-horses and bore them back to the wagons in triumph. Jim unpacked the scale his father had given him for this purpose and suspended it from the branch of a tree. Then, surrounded by everyone, he weighed the tusks one at a time. The right-hand shaft of ivory, the bull's working tusk, was more worn and weighed 143 pounds. The larger tusk weighed 150 pounds precisely. Both were stained brown by vegetable juices where they had been exposed, but the butts were a lovely cream colour, glossy as precious porcelain where they had been protected in the sheath of bone and cartilage. "In all the hundreds of traded tusks I have seen pass through the go down at High Weald I have never seen one larger," he told Louisa proudly.

  They sat late beside the campfire that night for there seemed so much still to say. Bakkat, Zama and the other servants had all rolled themselves in their blankets and were sleeping beside their fires when Jim walked Louisa back to her wagon.

  Afterwards he lay on his own bed, naked in the balmy night. As he drifted off he listened to the weird sobbing and laughter of the hyena patrolling the outskirts of the camp, attracted by the scent of the raw elephant meat curing on the smoking racks. His last thought was to wonder if Smallboy and the other drivers had placed the leather ropes and tackle of the wagon harness out of reach of those scavengers. With their formidable jaws the hyena could chew and swallow the toughest tanned leather as easily as he could devour a luscious oyster. But he knew that the safety and condition of the wagon harness was always Smallboy's first concern, and let himself drop into a sound sleep.

  He woke suddenly, aware that the wagon had rocked lightly under him. His first thought was a continuation of the last: perhaps a hyena was raiding the camp. He sat up and reached for the loaded musket that always lay beside his bed, but before his hand could fall upon the stock he froze and stared towards the afterclap.

  The moon still lacked two nights of full, and he could tell by its angle that it must be after midnight. Its light threw a soft glow through the canvas curtain of the afterclap. Louisa was silhouetted against it, an ethereal fairy figure. He could not see her face, for it was in shadow, but her hair came down in a pale cascade around her shoulders.

  She took a hesitant pace towards his bed. Then she stopped again. He could see by the way in which she held her head that she was shy or afraid, maybe both. "Louisa? What ails you?"

  "I could not sleep," she whispered.

  "Is there anything I can do?"

  She did not reply at once, but instead she came forward slowly and lay down at his side. "Please, Jim, be kind to me. Be patient with me."

  They lay in silence, without touching, their bodies rigid. Neither knew what to do next.

  Louisa broke the silence. "Speak to me, Jim. Do you want me to go back to my own wagon?" It irked her that he who was usually so bold was timid now.

  "No. Oh, please, no," he blurted out.

  "Then speak to me."

  I'm not sure what you want me to say, but I will tell you all that is in my mind and heart," he said. He thought for a while, and his voice sank to a whisper. "When first I saw you on the deck of the ship, it seemed that I had been waiting all my life for that moment."

  She sighed softly, and he felt her relax beside him, like a cat spreading herself out in the warmth of the sun. Encouraged, he went on, "I have often thought when I watch my father and mother together that for every man born God fashions a woman."

  "Adam's rib," she murmured.

  "I believe that you are my rib," he said. "I cannot find happiness and fulfilment without you."

  "Go on, Jim. Please don't stop."

  "I believe that all the terrible things that happened to you before we met, and all the hardships and dangers we have endured since then, have had but one purpose. That is to test and temper us, like steel in the furnace."

  "I had
not thought of that," she said, 'but now I see it is true."

  He reached out and touched her hand. It seemed to him that a spark passed between their fingertips like the crackling discharge of gunpowder in the pan. She jerked away her hand. He sensed that their moment, although close, had not yet arrived. He took back his own hand and she relaxed again.

  His uncle Dorian had once given him a filly that no one else could break to the bit and saddle. It had been very much like this, weeks and months of slow progress, of advance and retreat, but in the end she had become his, as beautiful and wondrous a creature as it was possible to imagine. He had called her Windsong and had held her head as she died of the horse-sickness.

  On an inspiration he told Louisa about Windsong, how he had loved her and how she had died. She lay beside him in the darkness and listened, captivated. When he came to the end of the story she wept

  like a child, but they were good tears, not the bitter hurting tears that had so often gone before.

  Then she slept at last, still lying beside him, still not quite touching. He listened to her gentle breathing, and at last slept also.

  They followed the elephant herds northwards for almost another month. It was as his father had warned him: when disturbed by man the great beasts moved hundreds of leagues to new country. They travelled at that long, striding walk that even a good horse could not match over a long distance. The entire southern continent was their domain, and the old matriarchs of the herds knew every mountain pass and every lake, river and water-hole along the way; they knew how to avoid the deserts and the desolate lands. They knew the forests that were rich in fruits and luxuriant growth, and they knew the fastness where they were safe from attack.

  However, they left tracks that were clear to Bakkat's eye, and he followed them into wilderness where even he had never ventured. The tracks led them to good water, and to the easy passes through the mountains.

  Thus, they came at last to a river set in a strath of grassy veld, and the waters were sweet and clear. Jim took his sights of the noon passage of the sun on five consecutive days until he was certain he had accurately fixed their position on his father's chart. Both he and Louisa were amazed at the great distance the leisurely turning wheels of the wagons had covered to bring them here.

  They left the camp on the river bank each day and rode out to explore the country in all directions. On the sixth day they climbed to the top of a tall, rounded hill that overlooked the plains beyond the river.

  "Since we left the frontier of the colony we have seen no sign of our fellow men," Louisa remarked, 'just that one wagon track almost three months ago, and the paintings of Bakkat's tribe in the caves of the mountains."

  "It is an empty land," Jim agreed, 'and I love it so, for it and everything in it belongs to me. It makes me feel like a god."

  She smiled as she watched his enthusiasm. To her he looked indeed like a young god. The sun had burned him brown, and his arms and legs were carved from granite muscle. Despite her frequent clipping with the sheep shears, his hair had grown down to his shoulders. Accustomed to staring at far horizons, his gaze was calm and steady. His bearing displayed his confidence and authority.

  She could not much longer try to deceive herself, or deny how her feelings had changed towards him in these last months. He had proved his worth a hundred times. He now stood at the centre of her existence. However, she must first throw off the brake and burden of her past even now when she closed her eyes she could see the sinister head in the black leather mask, and the cold eyes behind the slits. Van Ritters, the master of Huis Brabant, was with her still.

  Jim turned back to face her, and she averted her eyes: surely her dark thoughts must be clear for him to see in them. "Look!" she cried, and pointed across the river. "There is a field of wild daisies growing there."

  He shaded his eyes and followed the direction of her out-thrust hand. "I doubt that they are flowers." He shook his head. "They shine too bright. I think what you see is a bed of chalk stone or white quartz pebbles."

  "I am sure they are daisies, like those that grew beside the Gariep river." Louisa pushed Trueheart forward. "Come, let's cross to look at them. I wish to draw them." She was already well down the hill, leaving him little choice but to follow her, although he had no great interest in flowers.

  A well-trodden game path led them through a grove of wild willows to a shallow ford. They splashed through the green waters belly deep and rode up the steep cut of the far bank. They saw the mysterious white field not far ahead, glaring in the sunlight, and raced each other to it.

  Louisa was a few lengths ahead, but suddenly she reined in and the laughter died on her lips. She stared down at the ground, speechless with horror. Jim stepped down from the stirrup and, leading Drumfire, walked forward slowly. The ground beneath his feet was thickly strewn with human bones. He stooped and picked up a skull from the macabre display. "A child," he said, and turned the tiny relic in his hands. "Its head was staved in."

  "What has happened here, Jim?"

  "There has been a massacre," he answered, 'and not too long ago, for although the birds have picked the skeletons clean, the hyena have not yet devoured them."

  How did it happen?" The tragic remains had moved her, and her eyes swam with tears.

  He brought the child's skull to her, and held it up so she might examine it more closely. "The imprint of a war club. A single blow to the back of the head. Tis how the Nguni despatch their enemies."

  "Children also?"

  "It is said that they kill for the thrill and prestige."

  "How many have died here?" Louisa averted her gaze from the tiny skull, and looked instead to the piled skeletons, which lay in snowdrifts and windrows. "How many?"

  "We shall never know, but it seems that this was an entire tribe." Jim laid the little skull down on the spot where he had found it.

  "No wonder we found no living man on all our long journey," she whispered. "These monsters have slain every one, and laid waste to the land."

  Jim fetched Bakkat from the wagons and he confirmed Jim's first estimate. He picked out from among the bones evidence to paint a broader picture of the slaughter. He found the broken head and the shaft of a war club, which he called a kerrie. It had been skilfully carved from a shoot of a knob thorn bush: the bulbous root section formed a natural head for the vicious club. The weapon must have snapped in the hand of the warrior who had wielded it. He also found a handful of glass trade beads scattered in the grass. They might once have been part of a necklace. They were cylindrical in shape, red and white.

  Jim knew them well: identical beads were among the goods they carried in their own wagons. He showed them to Louisa. "Beads like these have been common currency in Africa for a hundred years or more. Originally they were probably traded by the Portuguese to the northern tribes."

  Bakkat rubbed one between his fingers. "They are highly prized by the Nguni. One of the warriors might have had a string of these torn from his neck, perhaps by the dying fingers of one of his victims."

  "Who were the victims?" Louisa asked, and spread her hands to indicate the bones that lay so thickly around them.

  Bakkat shrugged. "In this land men come from nowhere and depart again leaving no trace of their passing." He tucked the beads into the pouch on his belt, which was made from the scrotum of a bull buffalo. "Except my people. We leave our pictures on the rocks so that the spirits will remember us."

  "I would like to know who they were," Louisa said. "It is so tragic to think of the little ones who were snuffed out here, with no one to bury them or mourn their passing."

  She did not have to wait long to find out who the victims were.

  The next day as the wagon train rolled northwards they saw, at a distance, the herds of wild antelope parting like the bow wave of an ocean-going vessel. Jim recognized that this was how animals reacted to the presence of human beings. He had no way of knowing what lay ahead, so he ordered Smallboy to form the wagons into a defensive
square and issue a musket to each man. Then, taking Bakkat and Zama with them, he and Louisa rode out to scout the land ahead.