One Hundred and Four Horses

by Mandy Retzlaff

  I hung up and called for Denzia.

  “Saddle up,” I said.

  “Miss Mandy?”

  “The Land Rover,” I said, scurrying across the front room. “I meant the Land Rover . . .”

  We made the thirty-five-kilometer trip to Zimofa at speed, as the roads were empty and had been ever since the farmers abandoned this corner of the world. In the fields outside the farm, the horses milled. Wild little Rebel weaved his way to the fence to greet me as I stepped out of the Land Rover, but I could not stay and fuss over him for long. Our groom was standing at the end of the track, beckoning me with a wild whirl of arms.

  Denzia and I hurried over.

  “I don’t have time for this.”

  “You must make time. It is urgent. The horses, they have . . .”

  I threw a look back in the field. Forty faces contentedly turned grass in their lips. “Have what?”

  “It is one of the neighbors. You must meet him.”

  The groom turned and scuttled in the direction of Zimofa farmhouse. Once a palatial building with white colonnades, it now lay in ruins, but there was a mango tree still standing proudly in front, spilling shade across the garden. The tree’s boughs were heavy with fruit, and, for an instant, I was drawn back to Crofton. I pictured Kate dangling like a monkey from the uppermost branches, spying on Jay as he set out into the bush to hunt some helpless bird.

  There were two figures standing underneath the mango tree, a white man and his local Mozambican wife. The groom hurried over, still beckoning me with his hand. Denzia and I stepped into the shade, and I saw the deep scowl set into the white man’s face.

  When the white man opened his mouth to speak, Portuguese flew out. I could understand only one word in ten, and he spoke so quickly that even those seemed to blur into the rest. I threw a pained expression at our groom.

  “He is very angry,” the groom explained.

  “I can see he is angry—but what’s he angry about?”

  “The horses.”

  Around me, the Portuguese grew louder and seemingly more fierce. Spittle showered down.

  “I rather gathered that as well. Do you care to explain?”

  At that precise moment, the Mozambican lady at the Portuguese man’s side cut in. Her accent was thick, but her English was evidently better than her husband’s. As soon as she opened her lips, her husband’s voice faded away. I wondered who really ran that household.

  “Your animals have eaten our field.”

  “Eaten your . . .”

  “Twenty hectares of soybeans I have planted, and now all gone! All because of your big dogs . . .”

  Twenty hectares of land was a vast area to graze unnoticed. I threw a look back and could still see the diminutive outlines of the herd in their field.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “you’ll have to explain . . .”

  “It is very simple. Your ‘horses’ broke through their fence and onto our land. They ate our soybeans, and now you must pay.”

  I shared a sidelong look with Denzia.

  “I think,” I said, “I’d better see these soybeans first.”

  The lady and her Portuguese husband shared a sudden look. A conversation erupted in a language I did not understand, then quickly trailed off. The lady looked back to me with fiery eyes.

  “There is nothing to see. The soybeans are gone.”

  “Presumably,” I began, “the field is still there?”

  There was another explosion of vitriolic conversation. For a second the man seemed to be losing his temper, but the glare of his wife quickly cowed him.

  “The field is still there.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  The farm belonging to the Portuguese man and his draconic wife was on the eastern edge of Zimofa, just a little farther away from Chimoio. We climbed into the Land Rover and followed their truck along the dirt road. As we did so, we cut a circle around the fields where the horses were grazing. I kept a cursory eye out for some hole in the fence where the herd might have slipped through but, as I suspected, there was nothing.

  “We’re being fleeced.”

  Denzia looked at me, puzzled—while in back, the face of the groom who had summoned us here burst open with a big smile. “Yes!” he cried. “Madam, they are very cross.”

  At last, the vehicle in front of us slowed down and stopped, and I climbed out of the Land Rover. We were only a few acres distant from the paddocks on Zimofa, and the fields across which we looked were barren. I kicked my heels along the bank of the dirt road, glowering at the field. As far as I could tell, no crop had been planted here all season. The earth was turned and looked to have been plowed, but the only vegetation breaking through the surface was sprouts of scrub and buds of tough grass.

  “Well?” the lady demanded.

  “I think I’ve seen enough.”

  I had turned to climb back into the Land Rover, glad to be rid of these thieves and get on with my day, when I felt the woman’s hand landing on my shoulder.

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  Shaking her off, I climbed into the driver’s seat, motioning for Denzia and the groom to jump back in.

  “Good God, woman!” I laughed. “There hasn’t been a single soybean here all year! You’re surely not trying to say the horses ate up every last scrap, right down to the roots?”

  The woman was fuming, her nostrils wide. I kept my eyes fixed on her as I turned the Land Rover around and motored back up the road.

  In the rearview mirror, the woman was engulfed in a cloud of red dust. Then, like some malevolent spirit, she simply disappeared.

  At the riding school I was helping Albert and Never dip the horses, spraying them with solution to keep away ticks and lathering it up in their manes and the thick hair around their hooves, when Denzia rushed over.

  “It isn’t finished, madam.”

  I dragged the back of my hand across my brow, careful not to end up with the solution in my eyes.

  “Miss Mandy, they’re here . . .”

  Sure enough, as I walked out of the stables the Portuguese man was waiting for me at the gates with a local Mozambican man I had not seen before at his side.

  “I thought we’d had this discussion,” I said, fully aware that the man would not understand.

  The Mozambican man at his side translated, listened to the reply, and turned back to me.

  “Maybe we should sit down.”

  In the corner of the riding school, a skeletal tree provided some shade. Denzia brought us chairs and we sat there, with the hot Chimoio wind sending up flurries of dust.

  As the Portuguese man chattered on, the Mozambican translated.

  “My friend here owns a business in town. Perhaps you know him? He is a trader. His wife grows some crops on their land. A little wheat, some soybeans, the things a family needs to keep it alive.” The Portuguese man began to chatter again, and the Mozambican duly listened. “He is, I’m afraid, quite adamant that something must be done. His wife planted twenty hectares of soybeans, which your horses have destroyed. These are not wealthy people. You must be fair . . .”

  “Fair?” I exclaimed, outraged. “There wasn’t a single soybean in that field, and he knows it!”

  “You must be reasonable. This man’s wife is an honorable lady. If she says she planted soybeans, she must have planted soybeans.”

  Inwardly, I fumed. I fancied I could even see smiles dancing on the corners of their lips as the pieces of their sting fell into place.

  “What do you want from me?” I breathed.

  The Portuguese man chattered.

  “Payment,” the Mozambican translated. “We want what is fair.”

  My mind darted back and forth, but I could see no way out. In Mozambique at that time, there was very little law and order as we know it, and we were at the mercy of the authorities. In the case of a local having her crop eaten, we would be held responsible and have to pay. There was no one who could arbitrate on our behalf, and symp
athy from the authorities would lie with the Mozambican.

  “You don’t understand. I don’t have money. I don’t have anything to pay you, not if my horses had eaten all the soybeans in the world . . . I’m drowning in debt. Even if I had to pay you, I couldn’t.”

  “There is one thing that you have.”

  The Mozambican man opened his arms, directing his gaze over my shoulder at where Brutus and Shere Khan, freshly dipped, nosed at bundles of dried grass.

  “Your horses,” he said. “If you cannot pay in the proper fashion, perhaps we should set a price in horses.” The Mozambican man engaged in a rapid burst with his Portuguese friend. Smirking, he looked back. “I think we would set the price at two of your horses, in return for all twenty hectares of crop. We think that would be, as you say it, fair.”

  In silence, I stood. I nodded firmly at the two men and turned from them, just in time so that I did not betray myself with tears. I marched back into the stables where Albert and Never continued to dip the horses.

  “What is it, madam?”

  “Albert, I would like you to bring me . . .” My mind reeled. Of the horses who survived, there was not a single one I wanted to get rid of. There were too many memories circling each and every one of them. And yet . . .

  I looked around me. Brutus eyed me back, with his permanently worried expression. He need not have worried; there was no way I could ever part with him. My eyes drifted on, to regal Shere Khan, and I pictured Pat’s face purpling with rage when I told him she was gone. Then, onward I looked: Echo and Tequila, Slash with the white lightning across his brow, Philippe with his one sad eye.

  “Which are the worst for riding?” I asked.

  “Madam?”

  “The horses we can’t work with.” I hated myself for saying the words; these were the horses that needed us most. But I could not part with Brutus, with Shere Khan, with Duchess or Duke, not the horses who might help me drag myself out of this financial mess so that we could finally go and join Pat. “Bring me Pink Daiquiri,” I said, remembering her sunken back. “And”—my voice faltered—“Vaquero, too.”

  Thinking that Princess might calm me, I stopped in at her stall and steeled myself while Albert and Caetano set about the grim business. With one hand in my pocket, I fingered my phone, wondering how I could ever break this news to Pat.

  When enough time had elapsed, I collected myself, put on my plainest poker face and left Princess behind. On the other side of the riding school, I could see the gangly, ill-shapen Vaquero standing in the pen, with Pink Daiquiri standing behind him, oblivious to the true intentions of the two men ogling them from the fence.

  In short, sharp strides I marched across the yard and came between them.

  “We’ll take . . . that one,” the Mozambican said, a fat finger thrust in Pink Daiquiri’s direction. “And that one . . .”

  His finger seemed to thrust in Pink Daiquiri’s direction again, as if sparing Vaquero some hammer blow. Too late, I realized what was wrong. For Vaquero and Pink Daiquiri were not the only horses in the pen. Huddled close to Pink Daiquiri was her beautiful foal, Ramazotti. He seemed to be clinging to his mother’s side.

  I flashed a look sideways, searching for Albert, desperate to know how Ramazotti had found his way into the pen as well.

  “There’s been a mistake,” I began, floundering for the words. “Ramazotti must have followed his mother. I didn’t mean for . . .”

  The Mozambican man rounded on me, his Portuguese keeper looming at his shoulder.

  “No mistake,” he announced. “We take these two.”

  I looked at them, speechless.

  “We’ll get our truck ready.”

  They had only taken two steps when I stopped them. “A truck?”

  “How else did you think we would take the horses?”

  “When you came here,” I began, “you didn’t come for horses . . .”

  The Mozambican man muttered something in Portuguese and, together, the two men smiled. “It always pays to be prepared.”

  Pink Daiquiri and Ramazotti had no idea what was going on as they were roped up and led across the riding school into the darkness of a truck waiting by the side of the road. They did not look back, nor question who was taking them away to some unknown end. I supposed they trusted that they would be looked after, just the same as Pat and I had been looking after them for all this time.

  As they drove away, the Portuguese man nodded to me from the cab of the truck. It was a look that sent shivers down my spine.

  Vaquero’s head appeared, snuffling in my armpit. I turned to see his strange, misshapen face, his protruding teeth and wandering eye. Putting a hand on his muzzle, I stroked him softly.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  Vaquero looked up, his eye rolling. You can’t get rid of me that easily, he seemed to be saying. You’re stuck with me for life.

  It was some days before I could summon up the courage to tell Pat what had become of Pink Daiquiri and her beautiful foal. As I spoke to him, daylight paling into dusk, I could feel his anger reverberating down the phone. I held the phone away from my ear until he had calmed down, and I spent the rest of the night talking him down from returning to wreak his revenge. Pink Daiquiri and Ramazotti were lost to us, I said, along with Grey and Deja Vu—but the herd still needed us, and we still needed the herd.

  “What’s happening out there, Pat?”

  Still evidently disgruntled, Pat switched the phone from ear to ear.

  “I haven’t had a ride in a few days, Mandy. The tourists are checking out. Most of the locals, too.”

  “Has something happened?”

  “Not yet,” Pat muttered, darkly. “Mandy, I’ll have to call you back. We’re taking the horses somewhere safe.”

  “Safe?”

  “Well, as safe as can be. We don’t know when it’s going to strike . . .”

  Now I was lost. Sensing something, I stood and wandered to the end of the long, empty corridor. My footsteps resounded all along the passageway, but they were only one of a hundred different signifiers that I was alone. Outside, a wind was whipping up the Chimoio backstreets. The trees at the fringe of the garden, behind the security gates, surged from left to right, and beneath them, the night guard hunched his shoulders. In the garden, just along the wall, Echo was tethered to one of the trees. I had brought him here several nights before, the grooms having found him stricken with a fever none of us could explain. None of the equine medicines that Pat had left me had worked until, fearing he was slipping away, I had forced him to drink a handful of dissolvable aspirin tablets that I kept on hand in case I ever got a migraine. Miraculously, in the morning, Echo seemed to have come out of his delirium, and now he was eagerly anticipating being returned to the herd.

  “What’s happening out there, Pat?”

  “Mandy, haven’t you seen the news? There’s a cyclone out over the ocean.” He paused, ominously. “It’s heading right this way.”

  “Pat . . .”

  Its name, Pat told me, was Cyclone Favio. It had formed in the western Indian Ocean, more than twelve hundred kilometers beyond Madagascar, and over the past days it had been moving southwest, missing the Reunion and Mauritius Islands by sheer good fortune. Tonight, it was entering the warmer waters of the Mozambique Channel, that part of the Indian Ocean between the coast of Mozambique and the vast island of Madagascar. Soon, forecasters predicted, it would bring its fury to the shore, tracking inland across Mozambique, into Zimbabwe, and beyond.

  “Mandy, I’ve got to go. I don’t want to take any chances with Lady and the rest.”

  Pat hung up and I stood alone in the empty house. The wind coasting through Chimoio seemed suddenly to be the harbinger of something much worse, the first tendrils of a storm massing some thousand kilometers away. I went to the door. A gust of wind whipped the dust into a miniature maelstrom in the garden.

  We were in the path of the storm, but soon Vilanculos would be in its eye.

&
nbsp; Chapter 14

  IN VILANCULOS, the sky churned.

  The guesthouse at which Pat and Jonathan sought shelter, deeming their own home too exposed, sat high upon the clifftops, overlooking the frenzied ocean. Gone were the perfect vistas of azure and gold; now, the sea beneath them roiled as the winds tore in from the ocean.

  Inside, the guesthouse was empty, a cavernous hall where tables had once been laid for dinner, with a bar—now barren of all bottles—against one side and chairs stacked against the other. Outside, Pat and Jonathan cringed into the stirring gale as they brought all seven horses into view of the windows. The wind, already whipping branches and leaves overhead, was funneled away from the scrubby guesthouse yard—at least here there was some kind of shelter. The horses had all been fitted with halters, and Pat and Jonathan tied them, one after another, to the overhead picket, which ran the length of the restaurant.

  Lady was the last to be tethered down. Putting his arms around her once more, Pat promised he would not be far, and he turned to follow Jonathan back into the guesthouse.

  At the bar, the guesthouse owner, a blue-eyed Swiss man named Peter with a delightful grin, offered Pat a drink. If ever there was a time for Dutch courage, it was now, and gratefully they each slugged one back.

  The wind moaned. Pat looked up. The guesthouse was capped with a timber A-frame onto which thatching had been tied, but already the thatch was lifting away, revealing slivers of shifting sky.

  “How long do you think it will last?” Pat asked.

  At the bar, Peter lifted his shoulders in dramatic jest. “You are not going anywhere today, my friend . . .”

  Pat and Jonathan prowled the room, taking up a station, finally, at one of the shuttered windows. By prying the wooden slats open with his forefinger and thumb, Pat was able to keep a good eye on the horses roped outside. Black Magic strained furiously at her tether, and all of the horses kept shifting around, as if to attune themselves better to the wind. Perhaps the noise was fitful in their ears, for they did not seem to know from which direction the wind was coming. Pat drew the shutters open a little farther, daring to risk a glance into the sky. A great tuft of thatch arced overhead and he realized, for the first time, that the roof was being torn away.