Then his thoughts kicked off at a tangent. Soon, the day after tomorrow, if all went well, he would be back with Rosa. The deep yearning that had been his constant companion these last three months throbbed through Sebastian's whole body. Staring into the wood-fire on the hearth of the hut, it seemed as though the embers formed a picture of her face, and in his memory he heard her voice again.
"Come back, Sebastian. Come back soon."
And he whispered the words aloud, watching her face in the fire. Gloating on each detail of it. He saw her smile, and her nose wrinkled a little, the dark eyes slanted upwards at the corners.
"Come back, Sebastian."
The need of her was a physical pain so intense that he could hardly breathe, and his imagination reconstructed every detail of their parting beside the waterfall. Each subtle change and inflection of her voice, the very sound of her breathing, and the bitter salt taste of her tears upon his lips.
He felt again the touch of her hands, her mouth and through the wood-smoke that filled the hut, his nostrils flared at the warm woman smell of her body.
"I'm coming, Rosa. I'm coming back, he whispered, and stood up restlessly from beside the fire. At that moment his attention was jerked back to the present by a soft scratching at the door of the hut.
"Lord. Lord. "He recognized old M'tapa's hoarse croaking.
"What is it?"
"We seek your protection."
"What is the trouble?" Sebastian crossed to the door and lifted the cross-bar. "What is it?"
In the Moonlight M'tapa stood with a skin blanket draped -around his frail shoulders. Behind him a dozen of the villagers huddled in trepidation.
"The elephant are in our gardens. They will destroy them before morning. There will be nothing, not a single stalk of millet left standing." He swung away and stood with his head cocked. "Listen, you may hear them now."
It was an eerie sound in the night, the high-pitched elephant squeal, and Sebastian's skin crawled. He could feel the hair on his forearms become erect.
"There are two of them." M'tapa's voice was a scratchy whisper. "Two old bulls. We know them well. They came last season and laid waste our corn. They killed one of my sons who tried to drive them off." In entreaty, the old man clawed hold of Sebastian's arm and tugged at it. "Avenge my son, lord. Avenge my son for me, and save our millet that the children will not go hungry again this year."
Sebastian responded to the appeal in the same manner that St. George would have done.
In haste he buttoned his tunic and went to fetch his rifle.
On his return he found his entire command armed to the teeth, and as eager for the hunt as a pack of foxhounds.
Mohammed waited at their head.
"Lord Manali, we are ready."
"Now, steady on, old chap." Sebastian had no intention of sharing the glory. "This is my show. Too many cooks, what?"
M'tapa stood by, wringing his hands with impatience, listening alternately first to the distant sounds of the garden raiders feeding contentedly in his lands, and then to the undignified wrangling between Sebastian and his Askari, until at last he could bear it no longer. "Lord, already half the millet is eaten. In an hour it will all be gone."
"You're right," Sebastian agreed, and turned angrily on his men. "Shut up, all of you. Shut up!"
They were unaccustomed to this tone of command from Sebastian, and it surprised them into silence.
"Only Mohamed shall accompany me. The rest of you go to your huts and stay there."
It was a working compromise, Sebastian now had Mohamed as ally. Mohammed turned on his comrades and scattered them before falling in beside Sebastian.
"Let us go."
At the head of the main gardens, high on its stilts of poles, stood a rickety platform. This was the watch-tower from which, night and day, a guard was kept over the ripening millet. It was now deserted, the two young guards had left hurriedly at the first sight of the garden raiders. Kudu or waterbuck were one thing, a pair of bad-tempered old elephant bulls were another matter entirely.
Sebastian and Mohammed reached the watch-tower and paused beneath it. Quite clearly now they could hear the rustling and ripping sound of the millet stalks being torn up and trampled.
"Wait here, whispered Sebastian, slinging his rifle over his shoulder, as he turned to the ladder beside him. He climbed slowly and silently to the platform, and from it, looked out over the gardens.
The moon was so brilliant as to throw sharply defined shadows below the tower and the trees. Its light was a soft silver that distorted distance and size, reducing all things to a cold, homogeneous grey.
Beyond the clearing the forest rose like frozen smoke clouds, while the field of standing millet moved in the small night wind, rippling like the surface of a lake.
Humped big and darker grey, standing high above the millet, two great islands in the soft sea of vegetation, the old bulls grazed slowly. Although the nearest elephant was two hundred paces from the tower, the moon was so bright that Sebastian could see clearly as he reached forward with his trunk, coiled it about a clump of the leafy stalks and plucked them easily. Then swaying gently, rocking his massive bulk lazily from side to side, he beat the millet against his lifted foreleg to shake the clinging earth from the roots before lifting it and stuffing it into his mouth. The tattered banners of his ears flapped gently, an untidy tangle of millet leaves hanging from his lips between the long curved shafts of ivory, he moved on, feeding and trampling so that behind him he left a wide path of devastation.
On the open plat-form of the tower, Sebastian felt his stomach contracting, convulsing itself into a hard ball, and his hands on the rifle were unsteady; his breathing whistled softly in his own ears as the elephant thrill came upon him.
Watching those two- huge beasts, he found himself held motionless with an almost mystic sense of awe; a realization of his own insignificance, his presumption in going out against them, armed with this puny weapon of steel and wood. But beneath his reluctance was the tingle of tight nerves that strange blend of fear and eagerness the age-old lust of the hunter. He roused himself and climbed down to where Mohammed waited.
Through the standing corn that reached above their heads, stepping with care between the rows so that they disturb not a single leaf, they moved in towards the centre of the garden. Ears and eyes tuned to their finest limit, breathing controlled so that it did not match the wild pump of his heart, Sebastian homed in on the crackle and rustle made by the nearest bull.
Even though the millet screened him, he could feel the weak wash of the wind move his hair softly, and the first whiff of elephant smell hit him like an open-handed blow in the face. He stooped so suddenly that Mohammed almost bumped into him from behind. They stood crouching, peering ahead into the moving wall of vegetation. Sebastian felt Mohammed lean forward beside him, and heard his whisper breathed softer than the sound of the wind. "Very close now."
Sebastian nodded, and then swallowed jerkily. He could hear clearly the soft slithering scrape of leaves brushing against the rough hide of the old bull. It was feeding down towards them. They were standing directly in the path of its leisurely approach, at any moment now at any moment!
Standing with the rifle lifted protectively, sweat starting to prickle his forehead and upper lip in the cool of the night, his eyes watering with the intensity of his gaze, Sebastian was suddenly aware of massive movement ahead of him. A solid shape through the bank of dancing leaves, and he looked up. High above him it loomed, black and big so that the night sky was blotted out by the spread of its ears, so near that he stood beneath the forward thrust of its tusks, and he could see the trunk uncoil like a fat grey python and grope forward blindly towards him; and ANN beneath it the mouth gaped a little, spilling leaves at the corners.
He lifted the rifle, pointing it upwards without aiming, almost touching the elephant's hanging lower lip with the muzzle, and he fired. The shot was a blunt burst of sound in the night.
The bu
llet angled up through the pink palate of the animal's mouth, up through the spongy bone of the skull;
mushrooming and exploding, it tore into the fist-sized cell that contained the brain, and burst it into a grey jelly.
Had it passed four inches to either side; had it been deflected by one of the larger bones, Sebastian would have died before he had time to work the bolt of the Mauser, for he stood directly below the outstretched tusks and trunk.
But the old bull reeled backwards from the shot, his trunk falling flabbily against his chest, his forelegs spreading, and his head unbalanced by long tusks sagged forwards, knees collapsed suddenly under him, and he fell so heavily that they heard the thump in the village half a mile away.
"Son of a gun!" gasped Sebastian, staring in disbelief at the dead mountain of flesh. "I did it. Son of a gun, I did it!"
Jubilation, a delirious release from fear and tension, mounted giddily within him. He lifted an arm to hit Mohammed across the back, but he froze in that attitude.
Like the shriek of steam escaping from a burst boiler, the other bull squealed in the moonlight nearby. And they heard the crackling rush of his run in the corn.
"He's coming!" Sebastian looked frantically about him for the sound had no direction.
"No," squawked Mohammed. "He turns against the wind.
First he seeks for the smell of us, and then he will come."
He grabbed Sebastian's arm and clung to him, while they listened to the elephant circling to get down-wind of them.
"Perhaps he will run," whispered Sebastian.
"Not this one. He is old and evil-tempered, and he has killed men before. Now he will hunt us." Mohammed pulled at Sebastian's arm. "We must get out into the open. In this stuff we will have no chance, he will be on tOp Of us before we see him."
They started to run. There is no more piquant sauce for fear than flying feet. Once he starts to run, even a brave man becomes a coward. Within twenty paces, both of them were in headlong flight towards the village. They ran without regard for stealth, fighting their way through the tangle of leaves and stalks, panting wildly. The noise of their flight blanketed the sounds made by the elephant, so they lost all idea of his whereabouts. This sharpened the spurs of terror that drove them, for at any moment he might loom over them.
At last they stumbled out into the open, and paused, panting, sweating heavily, heads swinging from side to side as they tried to place the second bull.
"There!" shouted Mohammed. "He comes," and they heard the shrill pig-squealing, the noisy rush of his charge through the millet.
"Run!" yelled Sebastian, still in the grip of panic, and they ran.
Around a freshly lit bonfire at the edge of the village, waited the rejected Askari and a hundred of Wtopo's men.
They waited in anxiety for they had heard the shot and the fall of the first bull but since then, the squealing and shouting and crashing had left them in some doubt as to what was happening in the gardens.
This doubt was quickly dispelled as Mohammed, closely followed by Sebastian, came down the path towards them, giving a fair imitation of two dogs whose backsides had been dipped in turpentine. A hundred yards behind them the bank of standing millet burst open, and the second bull came out in full charge.
Immense in the firelight, hump-back, shambling in the deceptive speed of his run, streaming his huge ears, each squeal of rage enough to burst the eardrums he bore down on the village.
"Get out! Run!" Sebastian's shouted warning was as wheezy as it was unnecessary. The waiting crowd was no longer waiting, it scattered like a shoal of sardines at the approach of a barracuda.
I Men threw aside their blankets and ran naked; they fell over each other and ran headlong into trees. Two of them ran straight through the middle of the bonfire and emerged on the other side trailing sparks with live coals sticking to their feet. In a wailing hubbub they swept back through the village, and from each hut women with infants bundled under their arms, or slung over their backs, scurried out to join the terrified torrent of humanity.
Still making good time, Sebastian and Mohammed were passing the weaker runners among the villagers, while from behind, the elephant was gaining rapidly on all of them.
With the force and velocity of a great boulder rolling down a steep hillside, the bull reached the first hut of the village and ran into it. The flimsy structure of grass and light poles exploded, bursting asunder without diminishing the fury of the animal's charge. A second hut disintegrated, then a third, before the elephant caught the first human straggler.
She was an old woman, tottering on thin legs, the empty pouches of her breasts flopping against her wrinkled belly, a long monotonous wail of fear keening from the toothless pit of her mouth as she ran.
The bull uncoiled his trunk from his chest, lifted it high above the woman and struck her across the shoulder.
The force of the blow crumpled her, bones snapped in her chest like old dry sticks, and she died before she hit the ground.
The next was a girl. Groggy with sleep, yet her naked body was silver-smooth and graceful in the moonlight, as she emerged from a hut into the path of the bull's charge.
Lightly the thick trunk enfolded her, and then with an effortless flick threw her forty feet into the air.
She screamed, and the sound of the scream knifed through Sebastian's panic. He glanced over his shoulder in time to see the girl thrown high in the night sky. Her limbs were spread-eagled and she spun in the air like a cartwheel before she dropped back to earth falling heavily so that the scream was cut off abruptly. Sebastian stopped running.
Deliberately the elephant knelt over the girl's feebly squirming body, and driving down with his tusks, impaled her through the chest. She hung from the shaft of ivory, squashed and, broken, no longer recognizable as human, until the elephant shook his head irritably and threw her off.
It needed a sight as horrible as this to rally Sebastian's shattered nerves to summon the reserves of his manhood from the far places that fear had scattered them. The rifle was still in his hands, but he was shaking with fear and exertion; sweat had drenched his tunic and plastered his curly hair on to his forehead, and his breath sawed hoarsely in his throat. He stood irresolute, fighting the driving urge to run again.
The bull came on, and now his one tusk was painted glistening black with the girl's blood, and gouts of the same stuff were splattered across his bulging forehead and the bridge of his trunk. It was this that changed Sebastian's fear first to disgust, and then to anger.
He lifted the rifle and it weaved unsteadily in his hands.
He sighted along the barrel and suddenly his vision snapped into sharp focus and his nerves stilled their clamour. He was a man again.
Coldly he Moved the blob of the foresight on to the bull's head, holding it on the deep lateral crease at the root of the trunk, and he squeezed the trigger. The butt jumped solidly into his shoulder, the report stung his eardrums, but he saw the bullet strike exactly where he had aimed it a spurt of dust from the crust of dried mud that caked the animal's head and the skin around it, twitched, the eyelids quivered shut for an instant, then blinked open again.
Without lowering the rifle Sebastian jerked the bolt open, and the empty case ejected crisply, pinging away into the dust. He levered another cartridge into the breach and held his aim into the massive head. Again he fired and the elephant staggered drunkenly. The ears which had been cocked half back, now fanned open and the head swung vaguely in his direction.
He fired again, and the bull winced as the bullet lanced into the bone and gristle of his head, then he turned and came for Sebastian but there was a slackness, a lack of determination in his charge. Aiming now for the chest, handling the rifle with cold method, Sebastian fired again and again, leaning forward against the recoil of the rifle, sighting every shot with care, knowing that each of them was raking the chest Cavity, tearing through lung and heart and liver.
And the bull broke his run into a shuffling, uncerta
in walk, losing direction, turning away from Sebastian to stand broadside, the barrel of his chest heaving against the agony of his torn vitals.
Sebastian lowered the rifle and with steady fingers pressed fresh cartridges down into the empty magazine. The bull groaned softly and from the tip of his trunk, blood hosed up from the haemorrhaging lungs.
Without pity, cold in his anger, Sebastian lifted the reloaded rifle, and aimed for the dark cavity that nestled in the centre of the huge ear. The bullet struck with the sharp thwack of an axe swung against a tree trunk, and the elephant sagged and fell forward to the brain shot. His weight drove his tusks into the earth, burying them to the lip.
Flour tons of meat delivered fresh to the very centre of the village was good value. The price paid was not exorbitant, M'tapa decided. Three huts could be rebuilt in two days, and only four acres of millet had been destroyed. Furthermore, of the women who had died, one was very old and the other, although she was almost eighteen years old, had never conceived. There was good reason, therefore, to believe she was barren and not a great loss to the community.
Wilbur Smith - Shout At The Devil Page 12