by Wilbur Smith
In the few minutes since he had woken, the light had strengthened, and the eastern sky was a throbbing orange glow. There was a single tall mopani tree standing detached from the rest of the forest, surrounded by the low dry grass of the glade. High in its branches was a huge dark mass, and indistinct but violent movement made the branches of the mopani wave and thrash against the sky.
Lothar turned his horse towards it, and the thunderous growls of a lion were punctuated by yet another high-pitched shriek. Only then could Lothar distinguish what was happening in the top of the mopani, and he found it hard to believe.
‘Great God!’ he swore with surprise, for he had never heard of a lion climbing a tree. There was the great tawny cat high in the waving branches, clinging with its hindlegs to the trunk and reaching up with vicious swipes of its forepaws towards the human shape just beyond its reach.
‘Ya! Ya!’ Lothar worked his horse with elbows and heels, urging it to its top speed, and as he reached the mopani he flung himself from its back, and rode the shock of landing with his legs and back. Then he danced out to one side, head thrown back, rifle at high port across his chest, trying for a clear shot at the animal high above him.
The lion and its victim made an indistinguishably confused silhouette against the sky; a shot from below could hit one as easily as the other, and there were thick intervening branches of the mopani to deflect his bullet.
Lothar dodged sideways until he found a hole in the branches, and he flung the rifle up to his shoulder, braced himself over backwards, aiming straight up, but still reluctant to chance the shot. Then the lion snatched the human shape half off its precarious perch, dragging it down – and the screams were so piteous, so agonized, that Lothar could not wait longer.
He aimed for the lion’s spine, at the root of the tail, a point as far as possible from the twisting body of its victim who was still clinging with desperate strength to one of the mopani branches. He fired and the heavy Mauser bullet smashed into the base of the lion’s spine, between its bunched and straining haunches, and tore upwards, following the line of the vertebrae for the span of a hand, shattering and crushing the bony knuckles, destroying the great nerves of the legs at their roots, before ripping out again from the centre of the lion’s back.
The lion’s hindlegs spasmed, the long yellow claws retracted involuntarily into their sheaths in the leathery pads, loosening their grip on the mopani bark, and the paralysed legs could hold no longer. The great tawny cat came sliding and twisting and roaring down out of the tree, crashing against the lower branches as it fell, arching back on itself, snapping at the pain in its shattered spine with gaping pink jaws.
It brought its human victim down with it, its foreclaws still hooked deeply into tender flesh, shaking and throwing the frail body about with its convulsions. They hit the earth in a tangle, with an impact that jarred up through the soles of Lothar’s boots. He had jumped clear as they came down through the branches, but now he ran forward.
The lion’s back legs were splayed behind it like those of a toad, and it lay half over the human body. Now it reared up on its forelegs, pinned by its paralysed hindquarters, and as it dragged itself towards Lothar, it opened its jaws and bellowed. The stench of its breath was carrion and corruption, and hot stinking froth splattered his face and bare arms.
Lothar thrust the muzzle of the Mauser almost into that dreadful mouth and without aiming, he fired. The bullet entered the soft palate at the back of the lion’s throat, tore through the back of its skull, and erupted in a fountain of pink blood and brains. For a second longer, it stood braced on its stiff forelegs, then with a gusty sigh its lungs emptied and it rolled slowly over on to its side.
Lothar dropped the Mauser and fell on his knees beside the huge twitching yellow carcass, and tried to reach the body beneath it, but only the bottom half protruded, a pair of slim brown naked legs, the narrow, boyish loins bound up in a tattered canvas kilt.
Lothar sprang up and seized the lion’s tail; he flung all his weight upon it, and sluggishly the furry carcass rolled over on to its back, freeing the body beneath it. A woman, he saw at once, and he stooped and lifted her. Her head with its thick mop of dark curling hair flopped lifelessly, and he cupped his hand at the back of her neck, as though he were holding a newborn infant, and he looked into her face.
It was the face of the photograph, the face he had glimpsed so long ago in the field of his telescope, the face that had haunted and driven him, but there was no life in it.
The long dark eyelashes were closed and meshed together, the smooth, darkly tanned features were without expression, and the strong wide mouth was slack; the soft lips drooped open to reveal the small white even teeth and a little string of saliva dribbled from one corner of her mouth.
‘No!’ Lothar shook his head vehemently. ‘You can’t be dead – no, it’s not possible, after all this. I won’t—’ He broke off. Out of the thick dark mane of her hair a serpent crawled down across the broad forehead towards her eye, a slow dark red serpent of new blood.
Lothar snatched the cotton bandanna from around his neck and wiped away the blood, but it flooded down her face as fast as he could clear it. He parted her crown of curls and found the wound in her shiny white scalp, a short but deep cut where she had hit one of the mopani branches. He could see the gleam of bone in the bottom of the wound. He pressed the lips of the cut together and wadded his kerchief over it, then bound it in place with the bandanna.
He cradled the injured head against his shoulder and lifted the limp body into a sitting position. One of her breasts flopped out of her skimpy fur cloak, and he felt an almost blasphemous shock, it was so pale and tender and vulnerable. He covered it swiftly and guiltily, then turned his attention to her injured leg.
The wounds were frightening: parallel slashes that had ripped deep into the flesh of her calf, cutting down to the heel of her left foot. He laid her back gently and knelt at her feet, lifting the leg and dreading the sudden spurting rush of arterial blood. It did not come, there was only the dark seepage of venous blood, and he sighed.
‘Thank you, God.’ He dragged off his heavy military greatcoat, and placed the wounded leg upon it to keep it out of the dirt, then he pulled his shirt over his head. It had not been washed since the rock spring two days before and it stank of his stale sweat.
‘Nothing else for it.’ He ripped the shirt into strips and bound up the leg.
He knew that this was the real danger; the infections that a carrion eater, such as a lion, carried on its fangs and its claws were almost as deadly as the poisons of a Bushman’s arrowhead. The claws of a lion particularly were sheathed in deep scabbards in the pads. Old blood and putrefied meat lodged in the cavities, an almost certain source of virulent mortification and gas-gangrene.
‘We have to get you to the camp, Centaine.’ He used her name for the first time, and it gave him a tiny flicker of pleasure, quickly smothered by fear as he touched her skin again and felt the cold, the mortuary chill upon it.
Quickly he checked her pulse and was shocked at its weak, irregular flutter. He lifted her shoulders and wrapped her in the thick greatcoat, then looked about him for his horse. It was down at the far end of the glade, grazing head down. Bare to the waist and shivering in the cold, he ran after it and led it back to the mopani.
As he stooped to lift the girl’s unconscious body, he froze with shock.
From above his head came a sound that ripped along his nerves and triggered his deepest instincts. It was the loud cry of an infant in distress, and he straightened swiftly and stared up the tall trunk. There was a bundle hanging in the top branches, and it twitched and swung agitatedly from side to side.
‘A woman and a child.’ The words of the dying Bushman came back to Lothar.
He pillowed the unconscious girl’s head against the warm carcass of the lion, then jumped to catch the lowest mopani branch. He drew himself bodily upwards and swung one leg over the branch. He climbed swiftly up to the
suspended bundle, and found it was a rawhide satchel. He unhooked the straps and lowered it until he could peer into the opening.
A small, indignant face scowled up at him, and as it saw him, it flushed and yelled with fright.
The memory of Lothar’s own son assailed him so suddenly and bitterly that he winced and swayed on the high branch, and then drew the kicking, yelling child more securely against his own body and smiled, a painful, lopsided smile.
‘That is a big voice for a small man,’ he whispered huskily. It never occurred to him that it might be a girl – that arrogant anger could only be male.
It was easier to shift his camp to the mopani tree under which Centaine lay, than move her to the camp. He had to carry the child with him, but he managed it in less than twenty minutes. He was fearful every minute that he left the helpless mother alone, and vastly relieved when he led the pack horse back to where she lay. Centaine was still unconscious, and the child he carried had soiled itself and was ravenous with hunger.
He wiped off the boy’s small pink bottom with a handful of dry grass, remembering how he had performed the same service for his own son, and then placed him under the greatcoat where he could reach his unconscious mother’s breast.
Then he set a canteen of water on a small fire and dropped the curved sacking needle and a hank of white cotton thread from his canvas housewife into the boiling water to sterilize. He washed his own hands in a mug of hot water and carbolic soap, emptied the mug, refilled it and began to scrub out the deep tears in the girl’s calf. The water was painfully hot, and he lathered carbolic soap and forced his finger to the bottom of each wound, poured hot water into it, and then washed it out again and again.
Centaine moaned and thrashed about weakly, but he held her down and scrubbed grimly at the fearful lacerations. At last, not truly satisfied, but certain that if he persisted in his rough cleansing he would do irreparable damage to delicate tissue, he went to his saddle-bag and fetched a whisky bottle which he had carried with him for four years. It had been given to him by the German Lutheran missionary doctor who had nursed him through the wounds he had received during the campaign against Smuts’ and Botha’s invasion. ‘It may save your life one day,’ the doctor had told him. The handwritten label was illegible now, ‘Acriflavin’ – with an effort he remembered the name, and the dark yellow-brown liquid had evaporated to half its volume.
He poured it into the open wounds and worked it in with his forefinger, making certain that it reached the bottom of each deep cut. He used the last drops from the bottle on the rent in Centaine’s scalp.
He fished the needle and cotton from the boiling canteen. With the girl’s leg in his lap, he took a deep breath. ‘Thank the Lord she’s unconscious,’ and he held the lips of raw flesh together and worked the point of the needle through them.
It took him nearly two hours to sew the meat of her tattered calf together again, and his stitches were crude but effective, the work of a sailmaker rather than a surgeon. He used strips from one of his clean shirts to bind up the leg, but as he worked he knew that despite his best efforts, infection was almost certain. He transferred his attention to her scalp. Three stitches were sufficient to close that wound, and afterwards the nervous strain of the last hours swamped him, and he felt shaken and exhausted.
It took an effort of will to begin work on the litter. He skinned out the carcass of the lion, and strung the wet hide between two long limber mopani saplings with the fur side uppermost. The horses shied and fidgeted at the rank smell of lion, but he gentled them and fitted the straight poles of the drag litter on to the pack horse, then tenderly lifted Centaine’s limp body, wrapped in the greatcoat, into the litter and strapped her securely with strips of mopani bark.
Carrying the now sleeping child in the satchel and leading the pack horse with the litter sliding along behind it, he set off at a walk towards the wagons. He calculated that it was a full day’s march, and it was now long past noon, but he could not force the pace without risk of injuring the girl in the litter.
A little before sundown, Shasa woke and howled like a hungry wolf. Lothar hobbled the horses and took him to his mother. Within minutes Shasa was howling with frustration and kicking under the flap of the greatcoat, presenting Lothar with a difficult decision.
‘It’s for the child, and she will never know,’ he decided.
He lifted the flap of the greatcoat, and hesitated again before touching her so intimately.
‘Forgive me, please,’ he apologized to the unconscious girl, and took her barest breast in his hand. The weight and the heat and velvet feel of it was a shock in his loins, but he tried to ignore it. He pressed and kneaded, with Shasa blustering and mouthing furiously at his hand, and then rocked back on his heels and covered Centaine with the coat.
‘Now, what the hell do we do, boy? Your mother’s lost her milk.’ He picked Shasa up. ‘No, don’t try me, my friend, this is another dry house, I’m afraid. We’ll have to camp here while I go shopping.’
He cut thorn branches and dragged them into a circular laager to keep out hyena or other predators and built a large fire in the centre.
‘You’ll have to come with me,’ he said to the querulous infant, and strapping the canvas bag across his shoulder, he rode out on his hunting horse.
He found a herd of zebra around the next bluff of the mountain. Using his horse as a screen, he worked to within easy rifle-shot of the herd and picked out a mare with a young foal at her side. He hit her cleanly in the head and she dropped instantly. When he walked up to the dead zebra, the foal ran only a few yards, and then circled back.
‘Sorry, old fellow,’ Lothar said to it. The orphan would have no chance of survival and the bullet he gave it in the head was swift mercy.
Lothar knelt beside the dead mare and pulled back her top leg to expose the swollen black udders. He was able to draw half a canteen of warm milk from her. It was rich and topped with thick yellow cream. He diluted it with an equal quantity of warm water and soaked a folded square of cotton torn from his shirt into the mixture.
Shasa spluttered and kicked and turned his head away, but Lothar persisted. ‘This is the only item on the menu.’
Suddenly Shasa learned the trick of it. Milk dribbled down his chin, but some of it went down his throat, and he yelled impatiently every time Lothar pulled the wad of shirt out of his mouth to resoak it.
Lothar slept that night with Shasa against his chest, and woke before dawn when the child demanded his breakfast. There was zebra milk remaining from the previous evening. By the time he had fed the boy, and then washed him in a mug of water warmed on the fire, it was after sunrise. When Lothar set him down, Shasa set off at a gallop on his hands and knees towards the horses, giving breathless cries of excitement.
Lothar felt that swollen feeling in his chest that he had not known since the death of his own son, and lifted him on to the horse’s back. Shasa kicked and gurgled with laughter, and the hunting pony reached back and snuffled at him with ears pricked.
‘We’ll make a horseman of you before you walk,’ Lothar laughed.
However, when he went to Centaine’s litter and tried gently to rouse her, his concern was intense. She was still unconscious, though she moaned and rolled her head from side to side when he touched the leg. It was swollen and bruised, and clotted blood had dried on the stitches.
‘My God, what a mess,’ he whispered, but when he searched for the livid lines of gangrene up her thigh, he found none.
There was another unpleasant discovery, however: Centaine needed the same attention as her son.
He undressed her quickly. The canvas skirt and mantle were her only clothing, and he tried to remain unmoved and clinical when he looked at her.
He could not do so. Up to this time Lothar had based his concept of feminine beauty on the placid round blonde Rubenesque charms of his mother, and after her, his wife Amelia. Now he found his standards abruptly overturned. This woman was lean as a greyhound, with a
tucked-in belly in which he could see the separate muscles clearly defined beneath the skin. That skin, even where it was untouched by the sun, was cream rather than pure milk. Her body hair, instead of being pale and wispy, was thick and dark and curly. Her limbs were long and willowy, not round and dimpled at elbow and knee. She was firm to the touch, his fingers did not sink into her flesh as they had into other flesh he had known, and where the sun had reached her legs and arms and face, she was the colour of lightly oiled teak.
He tried not to dwell upon these things, as he rolled her deftly but gently on to her face, but when he saw that her buttocks were round and hard and white as a perfect pair of ostrich eggs, something flopped in his stomach, and his hands shook uncontrollably as he finished cleaning her.
He experienced no revulsion at the task, it was as natural as his attention to the child had been, and afterwards he wrapped her in the greatcoat again and squatted on his heels beside her to examine her face minutely.
Again he found her features differed from his previous conception of feminine beauty. That halo of thick, kinky dark hair was almost African, those black eyebrows were too stark, her chin too thrusting and stubborn, the whole cast and set of her features was far too assertive to bear comparison with the gentle compliance of those other women. Even though she was totally relaxed, Lothar could still read on her face the marks of great suffering and hardship, perhaps as great as his own, and as he touched the smooth brown cheek, he felt almost fatalistically drawn to her, as though it had been ordained from that first glimpse of her so many months before. Abruptly he shook his head with annoyance and a quick sense of his own ridiculous sentimentality.
‘I know nothing of you, or you of me.’ He looked up quickly, and with a guilty start realized that the child had crawled away under the horses’ hooves. With chuckles of glee, he was snatching at their inquisitive puffing nostrils, as they stretched down to him, sniffing at him.