‘My father tried to look me in the eye. He might even have tried to smile at me, but his smile was no more than a grimace of fear. He held out both hands, palms upward. I could see the beads of sweat bursting open on his brow. I watched them streaming down his face. He was speaking, he was saying something over and over, but I couldn’t hear the words that came out of his mouth. I couldn’t understand anything. I was far beyond that. And it came almost as a surprise to feel the kick of the gun, to see the answering jerk of his body, to look at the corpse as it rolled over in the dirt. I looked down. And I felt nothing. All I could feel was the arms of the leader circling around me. “You are one of us now. You are our brother,” he was saying.
‘They left the body like a rat that has had its neck broken. I only turned back to look once. It was as we were leaving. The huts were all blazing. But my mother was kneeling, she was bending over the body, she was cradling it as gently as if it was still living, as if it still meant something even though it was dead and meant nothing any more. And I knew at that moment that my whole world had changed; that I could never go back. I understood at that moment that it was not that there was no right or no wrong any more: it was just that there was no right.
‘From then on I lived with the army. They had made sure that I would. That’s what they do to children. They make sure that their villages won’t take them back. From then on the forests were my home, my squad was my family, my gun was my protector and my law was “kill or be killed”. And I just kept moving onwards. It was all I could do. At least it stopped me from thinking. We just marched and pitched camp, and then marched on again. Surviving through the day was my only goal. If I found fresh food or water I felt happy, but it was only ever for a while and so it didn’t seem to matter and in the end it seemed easier just to stay always sad. It’s not hard to give up hope when there is no hope left at all. Once you know for sure that you can never be forgiven, then there is nothing to worry about any more.’
Gulu stopped speaking as suddenly as he had begun. He was completely drained. He lay down to sleep. Bat looked at him as he huddled on his little wooden cot, his knees drawn up to his breastbone, his fists tightly curled.
CHAPTER THIRTY
It might have been two weeks later, it might have been three – they had lost all sense of time passing – that the children found themselves standing on a high mountain ridge gazing out over expanses of unbroken forest.
‘Keep close to that river,’ Yambabo was saying, pointing out the long snaking line of a watercourse far below them. It scoured its slow way through distant dusty flatlands, vanishing into the heat haze of the furthest horizon. The empty sky sang in the heat of the noon. This was not the life-giving savannah that he had grown up with, Bat thought as he squinted; this was the merciless Africa, the vast waterless land. He felt the first stirrings of fear in his gut.
Yambabo noticed. ‘A man could walk for all time across that desert and never get anywhere,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you wait for the rains to come? Why not return to the forest with us?’
The children glanced at each other uncertainly.
‘There’s a drought,’ Yambabo urged them. ‘The rains will not fall. The animals are all dying. In the villages, the pigs are frying in their own fat.’
It was Gulu who gave a firm shake of his head. A few days ago the pygmies had returned from a hunting trip with tales of huge strangers: men with black boots and guns dragging lines of ragged children with ropes around their legs. The children had looked almost starving, they said. They were stumbling and bleeding, but the men with the guns kept driving them on.
Gulu knew then that their hiding place was no longer safe. These were government soldiers the pygmies had seen. They were rounding up the rebel army, capturing the children. ‘They will not be kind to those they have had to come out and capture,’ he said. ‘They will make an example of them. If they find us, they will kill us. They will kill us or worse.’
‘But look!’ Bat now cried, staring out helplessly over the emptiness that unfurled far beneath them.
‘It’s safer than the trees,’ Gulu said. ‘The forest is a trap.’
Yambabo spread his hands. He was surrendering responsibility. He had done all that he could. ‘Then, if you must leave, listen carefully,’ he said. ‘After a few days, the river leads to a lake. There you can drink, find fresh grazing for your elephant. And from then on it is the elephant who will know where to go.’
‘How many days will it take?’ wondered Muka.
Yambabo just shook his head. ‘I’ve never been so far. I’m a child of the forest. I don’t leave it. I would be frightened of that.’
He was frightened now and when, that evening, they reached the ragged scrublands which lay at the thinning fringes of the trees, neither he nor his cousin who had accompanied him on this journey slept. All night, they perched on a pair of stones staring out into space, only rising every now and then to stalk about restlessly, shaking their heads. ‘I’m trying to remember a tune to sing,’ Yambabo told the children, ‘but now no tune will come into my head.’
Even as they were about to say their farewells, he made one last attempt to convince the children they were making the wrong choice. ‘The pygmies are decamping deeper into the forest,’ he said. ‘We are going to places that no one except us little people has ever found. There, even when the sun has risen, there will still be darkness around you. And when it is the darkness of the forest it is good, because we are the children of the forest and have no need to fear it. But out there,’ he said, nodding in the direction towards which they would be going, ‘is darkness of a more dangerous sort.’
Bat felt his heart gaining a sudden rapid momentum. He put his arm round Muka, felt her shrink in to his side. But Gulu stood firm.
‘Don’t worry about us,’ he said. ‘We will find a way. We have all the food you gave us.’ He nodded at three little baskets of berries and mushrooms and salt meat that the pygmies had gathered for them. They were to be carried on the back with a thin string of bark slung around the brow to secure them. When Muka had at first tried to lift one onto her head, the pygmies had all giggled. Every low-hanging branch in the forest would have knocked it off, they had said. But Yambabo was not smiling now.
‘Make sure that the water bottles are completely full,’ he told them, leading them downwards towards a small stream. The water should have flowed fast and sparkling at this time of year, but it had shrunk to a sludgy brown trickle in the drought. They dipped in their little goatskin bags, turn by turn. Then Meya stood, long after the others had finished, drinking and drinking until it seemed as if the whole stream would be sucked up.
Muka popped one of the little leaf hats that the pygmies had given them onto her head and peeped shyly out from under its green brim. ‘Do I look like one of the forest people now?’ she giggled.
But Yambabo didn’t respond. ‘You must lead them,’ he was saying to Gulu. ‘You know how to survive. Remember that a bolus of dried elephant dung will keep embers smouldering if you pack it up properly in a banana leaf. Then you can coax it back to life whenever you want.’ He gazed bleakly out towards the horizon. The first light of the sun stained a long line of clouds red.
‘May the gods of the ancestors go with you!’
He lifted his hand as he gave his parting words. He looked deep into Meya’s eyes as if he was telling her something, and then he stood there and watched without waving as they turned.
When they looked back to give him a last sign, it was as if he and his cousin had already forgotten them. They were standing in the stream, their skin gleaming in the low rays of the sun, giggling and talking as they splashed one another. They scooped up the water and let it pour down their bodies. It was as if they were washing every last trace of a world that was not theirs from their skin.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
For days the children walked. They would be up before dawn. They needed to get going before the sun rose. It did not come up gradually: it b
urst over the horizon, a glaring red ball, kindling the dry scrub and singeing the thorn trees. The hornbills that roosted among their bare branches looked gnarled as old bones that have been charred by the fire. They ruffled their feathers and squawked at the elephant as she passed.
The heat mounted fast, and with it came a dry wind that kicked up the dust. It whirled about the children in rough gritty eddies, clogging their breathing and chafing their skin. At their feet, the dead grasses had been gnawed right down to the nub. Herds of scattered grazers still tugged at the roots. But they couldn’t find enough food. The once butterball-fat zebra were gaunt and lethargic. Wildebeest stood like boulders draped with moth-eaten rugs. Even the buffalo, normally so formidable, had grown too listless to do much more than shuffle. When Meya brushed right by one, shoulder grazing against horn tip, it barely even bothered to lift its blunt muzzle.
The children followed the river, as Yambabo had told them. At this time of year its flow should have been swift, spilling over the banks into emerald marshes. Now, there were only a few stagnating pools left, thick with mosquito larvae and the droppings of parched drinkers. The children had to fill up their water-skins from this slimy soup.
‘It’s better than nothing,’ Gulu said when on the first day he noticed Muka shrinking. He seemed possessed by a new determination. ‘Drink as much as you can. I don’t want you flagging. I will get you back home, if it’s the last thing I do.’
Muka grimaced as she took a great gulp. ‘I will drink.’ She took a second long draught. ‘But it won’t be the last thing you do.’ She sucked at a third palm-full. ‘You will come to live with us in Jambula,’ she said, eyeing him from over the rims of cupped hands. ‘You will find a new home.’
A smile hovered tremulously upon Gulu’s lips. The despair that for so long had held him tight in its grip was beginning, little by little, to release its cruel fingers. ‘Will you want me?’ he murmured.
Bat sprang instantly towards him. He threw his arms about him. ‘Always!’ he shouted, almost knocking the boy flat.
For the rest of that morning the children were full of plans as they trudged along. They talked of Jambula and the people who lived there, of Bat’s grandmother and Fat Rosa and the headman and Marula and Bitek the fisherman and old Kaaka who could summon spirits up; they talked of the crops and the goats and the chickens and the cattle and, though Bat flinched deep inside when he remembered Kila, he ran through their names in his head one by one.
‘Imagine their faces when they see us returning with Meya!’ cried Muka. It was the first time since their escape that they had dared conjure such hopes.
But as noon drew nearer, as the sun clumped up the dome of the sky and the wind dropped and their shadows shrank to specks, they gradually fell silent.
The heat beat down on the dry earth, and then beat back up again. The skeletal thorns could offer no respite. Sweat ran down their faces; it dripped off their eyelashes and coursed down their cheeks. Meya fanned her ears constantly. She creaked as she walked, like a dry tree in the heat.
In the afternoons, when it was finally unbearable to go even a step further, they would descend to the dried river, Meya kneeling to lower herself down the crumbling bank.
‘Be careful,’ Muka warned the first day as they hopped across the cracked bed, jumping from one sun-bleached stone to the next as they looked for the last murky pools from which they could drink. ‘Crocodiles lurk in places like this.’ Like all village girls who have to go and fetch water, she feared more than anything these fierce scaly monsters that, even as they winked and pretended to slumber, would surge up to grab you between savage jaws. They didn’t eat you straight away, the women always said. Instead, rolling you round and round in a whirlpool of coils, they drowned you before lodging your body in one of their muddy larders. They would then pick at your corpse like a kola-nut snack.
But the children had to risk going right to the brink. They needed the water and the grazing was often a little better on the far side of the river too. While the children ate food from their little woven baskets, Meya would pick at whatever sparse forage she could find. Twirling her trunk around the dry brittle stems, she kicked with her foot at the base of the clods, dislodging clouds of dust. Then, placing the strands in her mouth, she began slowly chewing while the whole laborious process of twirling and kicking was started over again.
When there was no grass, she had to tusk the ground for roots, stabbing the soil with short, hard prods; or stretch for the high acacia branches which most foragers couldn’t reach. Their long thorny twigs had to be carefully manoeuvred, but the bark, which she peeled off in strips and then folded, was easier to manage.
But still, by the time they reached the fourth day of their journey, her belly was growling with hunger. Bat thought of the days when he would place a whole pineapple in her mouth; watch her as she crushed out the ecstatic rush of juice. He dreamed of the spreading jambula tree in his village, of the bitter-sweet freshness of its ripe fallen plums, of the soft throaty cooing of a dove in its shade; but now none of them spoke of it. They were beginning to feel the folly of their first excited hopes.
Meya longed for better times too. She was growing thin again. Her hide was beginning to sag and her back, where the ridge of her spine rose in a line of hard knobbles, was burned raw by the sun. The claws of the ox-peckers felt like sharp licks of flame. Sometimes she would pause, rumbling out a long low alarm call to her family, but the earth was too compacted to carry the vibrations. Occasionally she would trumpet through a lifted trunk, then listen for an answer, eyes downcast and ears spread. But she never got a response. The insects shrilled out their long strands of sound in the relentless noonday heat.
When the day was at its most harsh, the little band of travellers would fall asleep in whatever sparse shade they could find. But it never seemed long before they awoke, their lips parched, their tongues puffy. Sometimes wild dogs would be watching them with glittering eyes.
Not until the sun had begun its slow downward journey would the posse move on again. The air felt close as an oven. The dry grass would crackle and the ground burned their feet. Their soles began to bleed. Meya’s steady lumber grew slower and slower. She breathed in short puffs that blew dust from the ground.
Then, in the late afternoon, the wind would get up again, sending storms of dust crashing across the open plains. They coated every branch of the swaying acacias, filmed every last surviving leaf of every scattered bush with red. Dust filled the children’s nostrils and choked their parched throats. They tried not to drink from their water-bottles too often but, on the fifth day, Bat, in a fit of sudden desperation, drained his in one go. The water sloshed about in his belly as he walked; but his thirst was not abated. ‘If anything it feels worse,’ he moaned.
‘Never drink too quickly,’ Gulu warned him sternly. ‘It just blows up your stomach without slaking your thirst. Just take a small gulp and rinse it round and round your mouth. Let it soak off the dried slime before you start, tiny bit by tiny bit, to let it trickle down your throat.’
But later that afternoon they found some tamarind beans still hanging. They were far too high for the children’s clawing fingertips to reach; too high even for Meya’s stretching trunk. Placing her tusks either side of the tree, bracing her great baggy legs and heaving her whole body slowly back and forth, she managed to shake it so hard that its last scattering of pods fell. Inside the hard twisted shell, the little dry beans were wrinkled and brown.
‘Suck them,’ Gulu said, ‘and they will slowly grow softer.’ The others did as he said and a welcome mouth-watering sourness began to leak out.
Wearily they plodded onwards, eyes slitted against the dust. Meya was hearing and smelling rather than seeing her way forward now. She moved with a sense of slow purpose and direction, her trunk raised in the air, sniffing the wind. The children barely spoke. They were far too thirsty. Their breath wheezed from their throats in short shallow gasps. Sometimes they would pass a dead anim
al lying stretched in the dirt, a zebra or antelope that had finally given up the ghost, staring up at the sky from which the water that they had longed for so desperately had never come.
‘Keep going,’ Gulu would encourage. ‘The lake can’t be too far away. There we can rest, find fresh pasture for Meya.’ But though Bat and Muka would marshal their energies and, adjusting the thongs of their baskets, try to quicken their pace, it was Gulu himself who was now always lagging. His lame foot was dragging and he was troubled by a harsh cough which, when it started, would send him into chest-racking spasms. Sometimes, when he had finished, there would be blood on his lips. ‘I’m all right,’ he would say. ‘I can go on all right.’ But still Bat decided to empty out Gulu’s basket so that he could carry its contents himself.
Only at sunset, would the wind finally drop. The land would smoulder in the fading red light. The children’s thin shadows would lengthen upon the baked earth. Nightjars would sweep by on soft wings, scooping up flying insects. The cooling darkness would steal across the plains. The fireflies would flicker on and off in their branches. It was as if days and nights were passing in mere moments. But then time didn’t mean very much any more, thought Bat. There was only ever the present, only the endless slow rhythm of their onward plodding feet.
When the moon rose vast and eerie over the desert, the whole world seemed to glow hard and brittle in its glare. Things that in the day had looked perfectly ordinary now seemed menacing presences. The tall fleshy clusters of the candelabra-like cactuses reared up in the darkness like great citadels. The children kept well away. Just to touch the white sap of these plants left a burn on the skin. Their poison would kill any animal that tried to feed. And yet, sometimes, thought Muka, these lone plants seemed the only living presences to stalk the dead lands around them. Beyond was nothing but the night sky. It wept shooting stars.
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