The Devil's Breath

by David Gilman

  The plane wavered gently, its nose and blurring propeller pointing slightly above the horizon, as it seemed to balance precariously. The altimeter was marked in feet, and the needle nudged marginally past the 2 mark. Two thousand and a bit feet. Then the plane dropped into some sort of hole in the sky. The engine surged, Max’s stomach almost came up into his throat. “Turbulence!” she yelled again. “Happens all the time!”

  He felt grubby from not having showered since he left Dartmoor; the long-haul flight’s food sat somewhere in his stomach like a ball of clay, and the noise and heat from the engine were scrambling his brains. And the attack at the airport had left him decidedly shaky. Airsickness started to coil around his throat like a clammy hand.

  She glanced at him. “You going to puke?”

  Embarrassed beyond belief, he nodded.

  “Stick your head out the window!”

  He pushed out the Perspex side window the fifteen centimeters its hinge allowed, and thrust his head out into the cold slipstream that buffeted his face. And then he vomited. The airline’s prepacked dinner disappeared beyond the tail-plane, free from the confines of his stomach. He wished he could be free of this plane. But it was a long way down—as the dinner showed him.

  He decided to keep his head outside the cockpit. With any luck he might freeze to death. That would save him the embarrassment of facing Kallie again.

  What a way to make a first impression.

  Brandt’s Kraal Wilderness Farm was a jewel in the scorched landscape. A small, underground spring-fed water hole, about a quarter the size of a football pitch, and surrounded by palm and willow trees which created a cool haven. The ramshackle house was a huge, original Victorian bungalow with a deep veranda running all the way round it. Tired white paint covered the decorative finials running along the veranda’s lintel. Rust, time and the desert had taken their toll on everything he could see.

  Kallie swooped the plane once across the farm, fifty meters above the battered galvanized roof, and then sideslipped expertly and landed close to the house. Max was thankful to get his feet back on terra firma. The heat sucked his energy from him. A couple of cross-bred dogs eased out from the dark beneath the house, which he could now see was built on low brick piers, and their deep-throated growls warned Max.

  She soothed them. “Easy, boys. Come on.” They went happily to her, tails wagging lazily. Now confident that Max was no threat, the dogs sniffed his hand as he looked around him. The water obviously provided a vegetable garden, and drinking for livestock. These people were as self-sufficient as they could be. And where there’s water there’s wildlife, and that in turn brought hunters. A raptor circled lazily, high above the water. Ominous. Vulture-like.

  “It’s an African Hawk Eagle,” Kallie told him as he shielded his eyes. “Plenty of birds here for it, and some small game as well. I hate to see the songbirds get taken but … well, that’s how it is. Getting killed out here is a daily occurrence. For animals, at least.”

  “Are your parents here?” he asked, expecting the formality of introductions and preparing for long explanations as to how he was feeling, why he was there, and how hopeless his task might be.

  “Divorced. Dad’s got a newer plane than the old Cessna. He’s taken clients up west and north. Lot of birders come out here. It pays OK.”

  “So you stay here alone?”

  “I do the bookings, keep the place going. Got a few helpers for the heavy stuff; and there’s a town about an hour away. It’s pretty convenient,” she said.

  “I thought this was a wildlife farm. I don’t see any,” Max said as they reached the shade of the veranda.

  “Used to be. It went bust thirty years ago. We kept the name.”

  “And where’s Mr. Brandt?”

  “He died a hundred years ago. This used to be a watering hole for cattle drovers, and Brandt had this place then. We kept that name, too. There didn’t seem much point in changing it. People round here don’t like change.”

  People? Max could scarcely believe anyone lived within a thousand kilometers of this place.

  It was a blessed relief to lie in the cool water that slopped nearly over the edge of the old cast-iron bath. The discolored water came from the same source as the watering hole, the underground spring, but it was tepid, not icy as it would have been at home.

  Kallie knocked on the bathroom door. “When you’re ready!”

  A simple bed, covered with a mosquito net, stood in the middle of what was a room obviously belonging to a sportsman. Pictures and trophies were everywhere: swimming, rugby, shooting, hockey, football. It was Kallie’s brother’s room.

  “Johan’s away at boarding school. Look, you’re going to need better clothes than what you’ve got. You’re about the same size, so I’ve dug out some of his stuff.” Lightweight khaki shirts and shorts were on the bed, well worn but still serviceable.

  “How old is Johan?”

  “Seventeen, same as me. And you?”

  “Sixteen, nearly seventeen,” he lied. He was big enough, he decided, to get away with it, and he wanted to impress her. She looked at him and turned away.

  “We need to eat—and talk. Get dressed.”

  She had this casual way of telling him what to do. He didn’t like it, but he figured that people who lived out here didn’t have much chance to hone their conversational or social skills. He dropped the towel from around his waist and climbed into her brother’s clothes.

  By the time he sat on the veranda, which she called a stoep—an Afrikaans word—the sun was setting, light bleeding gently away, giving up the land to cooling shadows. Night comes quickly to those latitudes, and by the time food was brought to the table the sky was black. Beyond the water and trees, low on the horizon, the yellow full moon edged upwards. It was a wonder of such uninhabited places that Max had experienced before. Crystal-clear nights, free from the light-pollution of city and town, gave the stars a water-like clarity—so many, the sky glistened with them. And Max never ceased to wonder that this moon, so close that it seemed he could step to the edge of the world and touch it, had known the footsteps of mankind.

  One of the farm workers lit a paraffin lamp and the night bugs and moths hovered, attracted by the deadly flame.

  Max ate his first decent meal in a couple of days. It was basic meat and vegetables and had been cooked by a servant, a woman with a slight pallor to her skin, an almost apricot color, and what looked like Mongolian features: high cheekbones and narrowed eyes. While Max chewed, Kallie explained. The woman was a descendant of the Bushmen, nomadic hunter-gatherers whose way of life was virtually extinct. Two hundred years ago, colonists and black tribesmen alike hunted them like animals and, although the Bushmen never owned land—a concept alien to them—in more recent times the areas in which they hunted had been taken by the government and they themselves herded into a reserve. It sounded similar to the story Max had heard about the Native Americans.

  “Over the years my father did what he could for the Bushmen,” Kallie told him. “They’re very special, not many people understand them, and their language is extremely difficult to learn. It’s all about clicking the tongue against your teeth and the roof of your mouth … different sounds, different emphasis. Sorry, that doesn’t explain it very well, does it?” She turned and spoke gently to the old woman who had served them food. Max thought they were sweet-sounding, rhythmic words, and he could hear the different click sounds. The woman nodded and moved away, her eyes averted.

  Kallie saw his interest.

  “Don’t stare at her, Max. Staring is rude in Bushman culture.”

  “Sorry,” he muttered. “I don’t know much about the indigenous people here.”

  She was silent for a moment. “Y’know, the Bushmen are trapped—their souls are in a kind of hell for them. They are God’s creatures, as close to the red dirt as the animals that wander over it. Now we tell them they have to live in settlements, or reserves, but when the rains come and the lightning chases the clou
ds, then they have to go walkabout. Their spirit is out there in the desert. You put one of these people in prison, he dies, and if they stay out here, many die of hunger and thirst. Climate change, poaching, indifferent rainfall and the twenty-first century—it’s all stacked against them.”

  She gazed at him, searching his face, and he felt the blood ease into his cheeks as he blushed, like the darkening sky. He looked away. There were so many questions he wanted to ask her—about herself—but that too was probably ill-mannered.

  “Why are you here?” Kallie asked.

  “What do you mean? Because of my dad. Why else?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked out across the dry grassland. “This country kills a lot of people, Max. Maybe you should expect the worst.”

  “I like to take a more positive outlook on things. I think my dad’s alive.”

  “Fair enough. Y’know, it was because my father had always done what he could for the Bushmen that one of them brought those field notes here. He left his family out there to do that. My father was the only white man they could trust. That’s the only connection we have with whatever has happened.”

  “And I appreciate your help in bringing me here.”

  She looked away, and after a moment he followed her gaze. The old woman had taken a lantern and gone into the willow trees by the water, where she beckoned someone there to join her. A Bushman boy of about thirteen stepped out. He was slightly built, with an open, appealing face which smiled easily. He dipped his head in respect for the old woman. The only clothing he wore was a loincloth, embroidered with simple red and blue stitching. He carried a quiver of pencil-thin arrows and a short hunting bow over his shoulder, and in his hand a spear. He nodded as the old woman spoke to him, and then he looked up to where Max and Kallie were sitting.

  “He was the one who brought your father’s notes, four weeks ago. Long before Mr. Farentino contacted us. He’s been here ever since.”

  “Here?” Max asked. “Does he work here now?”

  The boy stood, unmoving, silhouetted against the enormous moon. Max watched as its soft glow embraced the boy and encircled him protectively.

  “No. You don’t understand,” she said. “He’s been waiting for you. He says it was written you would come. You’re some kind of ancient prophecy.”

  The Bushman boy’s name was !Koga, pronounced by drawing the tongue away from the roof of the mouth—at least that’s how it sounded to Max. Cloga was the best he could manage; he thought it sounded as though he was clucking at the hens, back at the school’s farm. There is no history of writing for the Bushmen so Kallie wrote !Koga—showing Max that the ! was the European way of expressing one of the many click noises used in the Bushman language. “He speaks some English,” Kallie told him. “His family helped a geologist for a couple of years.”

  Max shook hands with the boy, who glanced away shyly. “He told my father there were rock paintings in the caves,” Kallie continued. “I don’t know where, but I reckon about three hundred k’s from here. No one I know has ever been there. The paintings, so he says, show your arrival. He wants to help find your father.”

  !Koga remained silent, his eyes watching the horizon. Max was uncertain. This could be a wild-goose chase. The middle of nowhere was a dangerous place to be chasing flights of fancy.

  “Look,” he said quietly, hoping not to offend the boy, “pictures of me on cave walls sound a bit dodgy. Maybe my dad told him I would come, maybe !Koga or his family drew them—y’know, part of their storytelling folklore or something.”

  Kallie pulled a face. “I wish that were true, but the !Kung Bushmen don’t have a history of rock painting. The last ones discovered were a thousand years old.” She nodded to the boy, who turned back towards the cool shade of the trees by the water hole. “Don’t ask me how they know some of the spooky things they know—but I trust whatever it is they’re in touch with. Call it ancient wisdom; call it spirits of their ancestors—whatever it is, a lot of Bushmen have got it. He’ll take you as far as he can, back to his own people, wherever they are. Anyway, they’re the ones who last saw your dad.”

  Max only wanted to save his dad; cave paintings and prophecies felt as though they were going to get in the way. But could he afford to risk not going along with the very boy who had delivered his father’s notes?

  As he crawled under the mosquito net that night, his father’s face was the last thing he saw as he tumbled into fitful sleep. At first he was troubled by images of being chased, of being cornered in dark passageways, of being held under water, suffocating—all reflections of the day that his unconscious mind interpreted in its own way. But gradually he slipped past the monsters and settled into a deep and restful slumber.

  When he awoke, the first shards of light were breaking up the sky. Stretching away the sleep, he realized he was feeling great. And he was starving. He could smell coffee and fresh bread. It was predawn cold so he pulled on a lightweight jersey and made his way to the kitchen table.

  The old woman nodded at him, unsmiling, and said something he did not understand, so he nodded back, and within minutes a hot tray was taken from the old wood-burning stove’s oven; corn cakes and sausage were slid onto a warm plate and then the sizzling sound of three eggs being fried filled the kitchen. In less than a minute the plate was put in front of him. Not exactly the kind of health-conscious breakfast he was used to, but out here, he guessed, you ate what you could.

  By the time he had wiped the plate clean, the sun was dazzling the windows. Kallie came in and poured coffee into one of the tin mugs. “You ready to go?”

  He nodded, uncertain what she had in mind. “I’d fly you on further, but I can’t. I’m going up to see my dad, he needs supplies. He’s extending his safari, that’s northwest from here.” She picked up her coffee and went back outside. He realized she meant him to follow her.

  An ex-military, long-wheelbase Land Rover stood ready in front of the farmhouse. Its bodywork still sported a faded camouflage pattern. Two shovels were strapped to the bulkhead, a canvas cover was stretched across the skeleton frame of the vehicle; a dozen jerrycans were secured in the back, with another two in special holders on each side of the headlights, and a whip aerial’s three-meter length quivered in the barely noticeable breeze.

  “Most kids out here can drive round the farms by the time they’re ten or eleven, what about you?”

  Max nodded. His dad had taught him when they were on one of their holidays, but that was in a small, battered old car. This brute of a 4×4 might be beyond his skills. “Sure,” he said, “but I’ve never driven in the desert before.”

  “It’s mostly scrubland. If you hit soft sand you drive slowly; if you get stuck you deflate the tires. That’s the low-ratio gearstick for when it gets really tough.” She leaned across the Land Rover, pointing out the equipment. “There’s a foot pump, shovels and these sand channels.” She patted two metal runners, a couple of meters long and half a meter wide, strapped on the side of the Land Rover. “My guess is you’re heading for grassland and then maybe the mountains. This thing’ll take you anywhere, just don’t tip it beyond thirty degrees or you’ll roll it. There’s water in those jerrycans and diesel in these.” Max took all this in, determined to put a brave face on the daunting task. Twenty meters away, !Koga waited, squatting on his haunches, watching.

  “I’ve packed a few days’ dried food, but you won’t starve.” She looked towards !Koga. “Not with him.” Kallie gave him that look again. Gazing right into his eyes. This time the blood didn’t rush to his face. He felt confident. No point kidding himself or anyone else, he decided, not out here.

  “I lied when I said I was nearly seventeen. I’m not. I’m fifteen,” he said.

  “I know. I checked your passport when you were asleep.

  Sorry about that, but I wanted to make sure you were who you said you were. You’re crazy, you know that, don’t you?” she said.

  He nodded.

  “But if it was me … I’d b
e doing the same thing.” She smiled. And for Max that was warmer than the sun already climbing in the sky.

  “Time to go,” he said.

  Max wrestled the steering wheel. Over the past few hours he had tested the engine’s power, had made a mess of the four-wheel-drive settings, got it sorted, pushed himself and the machine and was bombing along a semblance of a track, red dust chasing him. !Koga sat next to him, a firm grip on the dashboard, smiling at the thrill of it. Kallie had told him that !Koga spoke some English, but so far the boy had not said a word. Maybe he was as caught up in the moment as Max. Heat, speed and a humming engine were intoxicating.

  Max eased off the accelerator: this was still what they called a road out here, but a surface of loose stones on a hardcore base was giving way to off-road conditions. Low scrub began to obscure the way ahead. As keen as he was to strike out and find his dad, he had to make sure he got there safely, and that meant he had to use his brain as well as his muscle.

  Before he left the farm, Kallie had spread out an old, creased and sweat-stained map, showing him landmarks along the way to Skeleton Rock—of which there were precious few. Buffalo Boulder, Snake River—a twisting dried-up riverbed; Dancing Grass Valley—where a permanent breeze from the mountains swayed feather-topped savannah grass; Lightning Tree—the remains of a giant bao-bab, blackened but still standing after a mighty storm had rolled across its arid valley.

  Grid references and map bearings would be his lifeline and he could plot a course using the fixed compass clamped to the dashboard.

  “You see rain anywhere—on the horizon, in the mountains—you take extra care,” she warned him. “We get flash floods that’ll tear you and that Land Rover to bits. One minute it’s a dry, safe place, and the next there’s a wall of water roaring out of nowhere.”

  As if Max didn’t have enough to worry about, now a rainstorm could kill him.

  Fear can destroy a man, his dad told him once, but knowledge dispels fear. Equip yourself with as much information as you can, lessen the odds against you and then you have a chance. Don’t give in to fear. It’s all in the mind.