One Hundred and Four Horses

by Mandy Retzlaff

  He watched the thatch sail over, twisting in the current.

  He looked, starkly, at Jonathan.

  “It’s coming the wrong way . . .”

  “Pat?”

  “The wind! They said it would come from over the ocean, but”—his eyes snapped back toward the horses—“it’s coming from over the land . . .”

  Jonathan’s face was blank. Then, an instant later, he understood. “The horses . . .”

  “We tethered them the wrong way,” Pat breathed. “They’ll take the cyclone full in the face . . .”

  Pat stood and scrambled across the vast hall. Before he had gone halfway, there came a sudden splintering of wood, and he looked up to see the timber and thatch of the roof lifting away. For an instant it hovered there, as if suspended by some unseen hand. Then, the wind rampaged in. Trapped inside, the wind raged, spiraling upward, driving the thatch before it. One second the roof was there; the next, it was sailing away, revolving almost gracefully as it was borne up by the storm.

  Exposed to the churning skies, Pat crouched away and made for the door.

  “You can’t go out there!” Peter cried—but Pat was already gone, Jonathan close behind, out into the storm.

  In Chimoio, the wind gusted through the riding school. I stood with Albert and Denzia, watching the skies. At the edge of the paddock, Shere Khan stood tall, as if daring the storm to descend. One after another, the horses were being moved up to the stable stalls for shelter. I reached for my phone and dialed Pat’s number.

  The phone rang. I clutched it to my ear, but all I could hear was the ringing at the other end. Silence clicked in—only for the ringing to start again, broken, interrupted by whatever was happening up there in the sky.

  With the phone pressed to one ear and my hand clamped around the other, I retreated inside the murky office. Slumped in a chair, I listened to the wind. The phone just rang, on and on.

  Pat and Jonathan stepped into the gale. Doubled over so that it would not drive them back, they ran, bowlegged, to where Lady, Black Magic, Fleur, and the others were tethered. One after another, they unwound the lead ropes.

  “Where?” Jonathan cried.

  Pat looked around, holding Lady tight. He opened his mouth, but at that moment, the wind rolled through with the power of a breaking wave, robbing him of all breath.

  Jonathan began to tug Black Magic across the scrub, closer to the guesthouse walls, as if he might tether her there. Pat clawed out, snatching at his arm.

  “Cut them loose!”

  “What!?”

  “Let them loose . . .” Pat’s eyes drifted upward. From somewhere, a tree had been torn up. It seemed to sail over them, eerily slow as the winds held it aloft. “What if we tied them in the path of . . .” Pat’s hands slackened around Lady’s lead rope. Then, he let it go. He stood, the wind pounding at him, and moved into the shelter of Lady’s flank. There, he looked her in the eye. “Let Black Magic loose, Jonathan,” Pat said. “Let them all loose. We can’t stay out here long.”

  With all seven horses untied, Pat and Jonathan turned and, somehow, pushed back into the guesthouse. Exhausted, their skin prickling from head to foot, they retreated to their wall and slumped down to the cold stone.

  Now, there was nothing to do but wait.

  In Chimoio, I decided to try again. I dialed Pat’s number and waited for the connection. One ring; then, a second. A third ring; then, a fourth. On the fifth, I was about to hang up, when—as if by black magic—Pat’s mumbled hello reached my ears.

  “Pat, are you there?”

  I could hear what sounded like an engine growling in the background, but it was really the groan of wind in the speaker. Pat’s voice, eerily calm, undercut the current.

  “Mandy, what’s it like where you are?”

  I grinned. “Nothing compared to—”

  I heard Pat mutter some curse. There was the sound of scrabbling, and then an almighty crunch, as of stone grinding against stone. A hundred thoughts charged, frenzied, through my mind.

  “Pat?”

  “It’s okay, Mandy. It’s the walls . . . The wind took the roof straightaway, but now . . .” He paused, shifting around. “It’s taking the walls, too. They’re . . . lifting.”

  As he described it to me, I tried to stay resolute. He said every time the wind roared up around the guesthouse, it strained at the walls. A deep fissure had appeared, running all the way around the hall, and soon that fissure began to deepen. Now, every time the wind came, the top half of the wall lifted, first by an inch, then by two, only to crash down again when the storm momentarily abated. Whenever it crashed down, dust exploded from the fissure, showering the spot where Pat and Jonathan crouched.

  It had been two hours, and the storm was only just beginning to flex its muscles.

  “We had to cut the horses loose,” Pat said, in between gusts of wind. “They’re out there now. I can see them through the crack in the wall . . .”

  Every time the wall lifted, Pat squinted out. What he could see was nothing less than a miracle. Some ancient instinct, bred into our horses but dormant for countless generations, was holding them from panic. They seemed to have formed into a V, like a flock of flying geese, with Black Magic at its head, her rear end pointed into the wind. Somehow, the shape sliced through the wind, spreading it around them like the head of an icebreaker cutting through deep floes.

  “Are they okay?”

  “For now,” Pat said, through gritted teeth. “They’re switching it round every few minutes. Black Magic’s shuffling into the V and Lady’s taking her place . . .”

  Four hundred fifty kilometers away, I marveled at it. These horses had never lived through a cyclone before, or any storm that came close to what they were going through now; this was ancient knowledge, bred into them by their forebears. That they could summon it up generations later was a mystery as wild and unbelievable as what was happening in the skies.

  I heard the crash again as the wall around Pat smashed down. Then, there was perfect silence. “Pat?” I asked. “Pat?” I brought the phone from my ear. It was dead in my hands.

  I dialed again, but this time there was no ringing, just a message in a language I did not understand, no doubt telling me that no connection could be made. I kneaded my hands in silent entreaty. Whatever was happening out there, I could only pray that Pat had the same fortitude as Black Magic, Lady, Fleur, Jade, Megan, Spicegirl, and Squib.

  “They’re gone,” Pat breathed.

  “Gone?”

  He turned to Jonathan. “They must have spooked . . .”

  This time, when the wall lifted and the wind clawed in through the gaping crack, Black Magic, Lady, and the rest were nowhere to be seen. The yard outside the guesthouse, now bare in great patches where the wind had torn the scrub away, was empty of life. Pat crouched at the crack, glaring out. Then, with an enormous groan, the wall smashed back down. He reeled back.

  “Come on . . .”

  He took off, flailing his way across the cavernous hall, ignoring the cries of Peter, who was still propped up at the bar. The doors to the guesthouse were bolted, but the second Pat lifted the latch, the wind took them and opened the guesthouse to the swirling vortex outside. Suddenly, the wind was pounding at Pat’s chest, curling around to propel him forward, tendrils seeming to snake around his legs.

  Jonathan appeared at his side.

  Pat took a step outside, clinging to the open door. When he let go, the wind thrust him forward. He braced himself, skidding across sand and scrub. When he lifted a foot, the wind closed its fist around him. He tried to take a step, but the step became a stride, and the stride became a great leap. In three bounds, borne by the wind, he had crossed the yard. Against the pummeling gusts, he turned his head to see Jonathan, eyes scrunched tight, following in the same weightless bounds.

  “Where are they?” Jonathan asked, his voice barely audible.

  They waited for a momentary respite and then set off again. No sooner had they take
n a single step than the wind flurried up again. Pat grappled out for the bough of a tree, snatching at Jonathan with his other hand. Together, they clung on.

  “We’ve got to go back . . .” Pat uttered, the breath snatched from his throat. Yet, when they tried to turn toward the guesthouse, its doors now ripped from their hinges and sailing somewhere overhead, they found that they could not move.

  The wind was driving them, and it would not let them retreat.

  Pat gave up, turning his head against the gusts so that he might fill his lungs. He closed his eyes, willed himself: make a plan, make a plan, make a plan . . .

  “After the horses, then,” he started.

  Jonathan nodded. “After the horses, Pat.”

  They rode the wind along the track, releasing their grasp on the tree and letting the gale carry them on. Overhead, the trunks of uprooted trees sailed past, their slow rise and fall seemingly out of tune with the anger of the storm. Halfway along the track, lifted from the ground, Pat grabbed for another tree. Jonathan clung on at the opposite side of the track. Pausing only to gather their breath, they gazed up. A section of wall from some rondavel hut floated on.

  They came along the track in stages, carried by the wind for meters at a time before snatching onto the semisecurity of whatever trees were left standing.

  At last, they reached the stables where the horses were kept. Nobody was there. Nothing but the wind.

  Pat and Jonathan clung to the trees that bordered the stables, seeking whatever shelter they could. Between gasps for air, they looked out onto the barrenness. On the far side of the stables, the fences were gone. One of the trees in the center had been uprooted; the only sign there had ever been anything there was the crater the wind had left behind when it tore the trunk into the sky.

  Pat felt a vibrating in his pocket, went to pick up his phone, but as soon as he took his hand off the tree, he felt as if he might be ripped away.

  “We have to move,” he said.

  “Where to?”

  There was only one way to go: forward, deeper into the storm . . . wherever the wind might carry them.

  They flew past the stables, up and over an intersection in the track. Some of the local huts still stood here, and Pat and Jonathan flew between them. There were no trails to follow in the sand, no signs of which way the horses might have fled. Somewhere along the way, the horses evaporated from Pat’s thoughts. He found himself flung against the wall of a rondavel and heaved himself around it, dragging Jonathan into the scant shelter of its downwind side.

  When he came out of his reverie, he saw that the door to the hut was gone, no doubt carried off into the storm. From inside, a group of terrified faces peered out. Their eyes urged him to move. He clawed out to take hold of the rondavel wall and, in that way, hauled himself inside, heaving Jonathan in after.

  Lying on the earth in the middle of the rondavel, Pat looked up, through the missing roof, at the patchwork sky. Tree trunks and branches, pieces of wall, and household detritus all sailed past.

  He turned against the spectacle and reached for his phone.

  I was in the garden, arms around Echo, when the phone began to ring.

  “Pat?”

  “Hello, Mandy . . .”

  The sound of the wind was duller now, but I could still hear it roaring around him.

  “Where are you?”

  “I lost them, Mandy. They spooked . . .”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Lady, Fleur, Black Magic . . . They’re gone.”

  “Pat,” I repeated, “are you hurt?”

  “Damn it, Mandy, didn’t you hear? I lost them all . . . I had to cut them loose. They took it as long as they could, and then they spooked. We followed, but we couldn’t . . .”

  “Stay where you are,” I said, as if I was commanding a four-year-old Jay not to go wandering off into the Two Tree bush. “Are you listening to me, Pat?”

  In reply, there was only the sound of the wind.

  “Pat, are you listening?”

  “I hear you, Mandy,” he finally said.

  “They might still be out there . . .”

  “They might be in the ocean. They might be in the sky.”

  I found my hand squeezing the strands of Echo’s mane. “So might you,” I breathed.

  I hung up and loosened my hold on Echo. The wind played its terrible percussion on the rooftops, but it seemed nothing but a gentle summer’s breeze compared to what was happening around Pat.

  Hours later, certain now that the storm had passed, Pat and Jonathan emerged from the rondavel to see a world carved apart. The other huts past which they had tumbled were gone completely, leaving no trace upon the land. They walked, in a daze, into stretches of barren scrub, the air curiously still all around them.

  Hoping that the horses might now have gravitated back to their home, Pat and Jonathan picked their way back to the stables. Cashew nut trees, torn up by the roots, lay across the tracks, making them impassable. Pat and Jonathan clambered on, only to find the stable area barren.

  “Where else?” Jonathan asked.

  Unable to reply, Pat kicked wildly at a fallen trunk. He turned, was about to spit out a string of curses, when his phone chimed in his pocket. At last, there was signal again.

  Moments later, he hung up and turned to Jonathan.

  “They’re out near the airstrip,” he said.

  It was five kilometers by the inland road, but not nearly so much by beach. “But how . . .”

  Together, Pat and Jonathan hurried to the edge of the cliffs and scrambled down to the sand beneath. Though the tide was out, the sand was strewn with the flotsam the waves had disgorged. The head of a once-proud fishing dhow broke through the crust, half buried. Against all the odds, its mast still stood.

  Like two wanderers at the end of the world, Pat and Jonathan picked their way through the wreckage and came by coast to the small village of Chibobobo. Here, few people moved. Those who had remained behind walked the empty streets, marveling at the gaping holes where houses used to be, the clear blue vaults of the sky.

  Pat and Jonathan weaved toward the airstrip, clambering over the crude roadblocks of fallen trees, vivid reminders of the way the war vets still trapped Zimbabwean farmers in their homes. The airstrip was on the edge of town, a barren runway along which small passenger and cargo planes brought the outside world to Vilanculos. In the middle of the strip a small airliner with propellers on each wing sat skewed, as if pushed from its blocks by the force of the storm. Beneath its wings, there stood Lady and Black Magic. Pat began to run, vaulting the debris that had collected in the road, with Jonathan close behind. Soon, he could see Squib on the hidden side of the plane. Megan and Spicegirl stood together farther down the strip, with a lonely Fleur even farther along.

  “Jade . . .” Pat uttered. “Where’s Jade?”

  He wheeled around, searching for the lost mare, only for a horse’s head to loom suddenly in front of him. Reeling back, he saw that she was already being led. Jonathan stood at her side, Jade’s lead rope in his hand.

  “She doesn’t have a scratch . . .”

  Pat approached Black Magic and Lady cautiously, desperate that they should not spook and disappear off the end of the airstrip, out into the bush. By some strange mercy, there was not a mark on either of them. Pat ran his hands up and down them, searching for some unseen cut, but there was nothing.

  He looked back over the ruin that had been wrought on Vilanculos.

  “It looks like they got through it better than the rest of us.”

  Taking two lead ropes in either hand, with Jonathan gathering up the remaining three stragglers, Pat turned the horses toward Vilanculos. At his right shoulder, Lady strained at her throatlatch, tugging in the opposite direction.

  At the end of the airstrip, they stopped. Ahead of them, the road was blocked by fallen trees, colored by debris swept in from the bush and up from the sea. Big pieces of thatch, torn from the roofs of homes, marked the path back
to the coast.

  It was going to be a long walk home.

  In the days after the cyclone, Pat and I spoke every hour. The rondavel where he and Jonathan had been sleeping at night was destroyed, but they found a place to stay, an abandoned house surrounded by palm and cashew nut trees and the ocean only a stone’s throw away, where they could live among the horses. In Chimoio, we gathered ourselves and returned to business. Piece by piece, dollar by dollar, we paid back what we had borrowed and inched closer to joining Pat.

  It was to be a year before we could follow the road Pat had taken, a whole year before Vaquero, Princess, and I could go to the ocean and see what had become of my husband and the fragment of the herd with whom he was living. On the day that I went to the moneylender to pay off the final monies we owed, I felt like I was dreaming. I drove back through Chimoio’s barren streets, feeling as if I were twenty years younger. With the windows wound down, I searched the radio for some music to buoy me on my way but found only snatches of songs amid all the static. It did not matter. There were 450 kilometers between me and Pat, but for the first time it seemed a simple skip and a jump away. We would be there by fall of night.

  At the riding school, Albert had organized the grooms. Four great trucks were waiting. We could load six or seven horses into each, eight if they were smaller, but the insides were tight, and we would have to make many stops along the way. The roads were worn and rutted, not maintained by the government and left to fragment ever since the days of Mozambique’s ruinous civil war. It would not be the most comfortable ride for the horses, but along the way, we would find water and grazing. It did not matter to me, and I doubted it mattered to Shere Khan, Princess, and the rest; we were leaving at last, going to find Pat.

  Albert and the local grooms were leading the horses into each trailer. Out on Zimofa Farm, the part of the herd living there had already been loaded. Others were loaded and parked around the school. Some trucks had come up from Vilanculos, where Pat had sourced them from other exiled Zimbabweans and South African entrepreneurs who were trying to forge lives on that part of the coast. Others we had leased in Chimoio itself. It was a ramshackle caravan of vehicles, but Albert had checked each of the engines, and we were confident they would, at least, get us to Pat. I did not care about the expense, even after everything I had been through to pay back the moneylender and wipe our slate clean. All I cared about was that we were finally leaving.