by Wilbur Smith
‘Tessay has an economics degree from Addis University,’ Boris chuckled. ‘She is very clever. She knows everything. You ask her, she will tell you. History, religion, economics – just ask her.’ Tessay relapsed into silence at the rebuff.
In the middle of the afternoon the rain at last eased and a timid sun peered through the cloud banks. Boris stopped the Toyota in a deserted stretch of countryside. ‘Pinkel pause,’ he announced. ‘Wee-wee stop. Pee-pee time.’
The two girls left the truck and wandered away amongst the rocks. When they returned to the vehicle they had changed their clothing. Both of them now wore the shammas and the jodhpur trousers of the country.
‘Tessay has made me a gift of a traditional Tigrean costume,’ said Royan, pirouetting for Nicholas’s approval.
‘Looks good, too,’ he gave his opinion. ‘You will be a lot more comfortable in pants.’
The sun was lowering as the road dropped into another rocky valley, down the length of which ran a river with steep, eroded banks. Above the river nestled a circular, white-walled church with a wooden Coptic cross set high on its reed-thatched roof. The village of tukuls huddled around the church.
‘Debra Maryam,’ Boris announced with satisfaction, ‘the hill of the Virgin Mary, and the river is the Dandera. I sent my men on ahead in the big truck. They will have the camp ready and be waiting for us. We will sleep here tonight, and tomorrow we will follow the river downstream until we reach the rim of the gorge.’
Boris’s camp staff had set up the tents in a eucalyptus grove just beyond the village.
‘The second tent is yours,’ Boris pointed it out.
‘That will do fine for Royan,’ Nicholas agreed. ‘I will need a tent on my own.’
‘Dik-dik and separate tents,’ Boris looked at him with a flat, pale stare. ‘A hell of a man. You impress me.’
He shouted for his men to erect Nicholas’s tent alongside the other, the side walls almost touching.
‘You may get up your courage during the night,’ he leered at Nicholas. ‘Don’t want you to have too far to walk.’
The shower under which they bathed was a drum hung in the lower branches of one of the blue gum trees, with a roofless canvas screen set up around it. Royan used it first and came back looking cheerful and refreshed, and with a damp towel wrapped around her hair.
‘Your turn, Nicky!’ she called to Nicholas as she passed his tent. ‘The water is beautifully hot.’
It was dark by the time Nicholas had showered and changed. He walked across to the dining tent where the rest of the party were already seated in camp chairs around the fire. The two women sat a little to one side, talking quietly, and Boris had his feet propped on the low table as he leaned back in his chair with a glass in one hand.
He indicated the vodka bottle on the table, as Nicholas stepped into the circle of firelight, ‘Get yourself a drink. Ice in the bucket.’
‘I prefer a beer,’ Nicholas told him. ‘Thirsty drive.’ Boris shrugged and bellowed for his camp butler to bring a brown bottle from the portable gas refrigerator.
‘Let me tell you something, a little secret.’ He grinned at Nicholas as he poured himself another vodka. ‘There is no such animal as a striped dik-dik these days, even if there ever was one. You are wasting your time and your money.’
‘Fine,’ Nicholas agreed mildly. ‘It’s my time and my money.’
‘Just because some old fart shot one back in the Dark Ages, doesn’t mean you are going to find another now. We could go up into the tea plantations for elephant. I saw three bulls there only ten days ago. All with tusks over a hundred pounds a side.’
As they argued, the level in Boris’s vodka bottle fell like the Nile at the end of the inundation. When Tessay told them that the meal was ready, Boris carried the bottle with him; he stumbled on his way to the table. During the meal his only contribution to the conversation was to snarl at Tessay.
‘The lamb is raw. Why don’t you see to it that the cook does it properly? Damn monkeys, you have to watch everything they do.’
‘Is your lamb under-cooked, Alto Nicholas?’ Tessay asked without looking at her husband. ‘I can have them cook it longer.’
‘It’s perfect,’ he assured her. ‘I like mine pink.’
By the end of dinner the vodka bottle at Boris’s elbow was empty, and his face was flushed and swollen. He got up from the table without a word and disappeared into the darkness in the direction of his tent, swaying on his feet and occasionally catching his balance with a two-step jig.
‘I apologize,’ Tessay told them quietly. ‘It is only in the evenings. In the day he is fine. It is a Russian tradition, the vodka.’ She smiled brightly; only her eyes stayed sad.
‘It is a lovely night, and too early yet for bed. Would you like to walk up to the church? It is very old and famous. I will have one of the servants bring a lantern, so that you may admire the murals.’
The servant walked ahead of them, lighting their way, and an ancient priest waited to welcome them on the portico of the circular building. He was thin and so very black that only his teeth flashed in the gloom. He carried a magnificent Coptic cross in massive native silver, set with carnelians and other semi-precious stones.
Both Royan and Tessay dropped on their knees in front of him to ask for his blessing. He slapped their cheeks lightly with the cross and genuflected over them, mumbling his benediction in Amharic. Then he ushered them into the interior.
The walls were covered with a magnificent display of paintings in brilliant primary colours. In the lantern light they blazed like gemstones. There was a strong Byzantine flavour to the style: the saints’ eyes were huge and slanted, with great golden halos over their heads. Above the altar, with its tinsel and brass furnishing, the Virgin cradled her infant while the three wise men and a host of angels knelt in adoration. Nicholas slipped his Polaroid camera from the pocket of his jacket and adjusted the flash. He wandered around the church photographing these murals, while Tessay and Royan knelt before the altar side by side.
Once he had finished his photography Nicholas found a seat on the hand-hewn wooden pews and sat quietly watching their intent faces which the candlelight touched with golden highlights, and he was moved by the beauty of the moment.
‘I wish I had that kind of faith,’ he thought, as he had so often before. ‘It must be a comfort in the hard times. I wish I were able to pray like that for Rosalind and the girls.’ He could not stay longer, and he went out and sat on the church portico where he watched the night sky.
In these high altitudes, in the thin unpolluted air, the stars were such a dazzling blaze that it was difficult to pick out the individual constellations. After a while his sadness abated. It was good to be back in Africa.
When the two women emerged at last from the dark interior, Nicholas gave the old priest a one hundred birr note and a Polaroid photograph of himself which the old man clearly valued above the money. Then the three of them walked back down the hill together in companionable silence.
‘Nicky!’ Royan shook him awake. When he sat up and switched on his torch, he saw that she had thrown the woollen shawl over a pair of men’s striped pyjamas before she had come into his tent.
‘What is it?’ he asked, but before she could answer he heard the sound of a hoarse and angry voice shouting invective in the night, and then the unmistakable thud of a clenched fist striking flesh and bone.
‘He’s beating her.’ Royan’s voice was tight with outrage. ‘You have to make him stop.’
There was a cry of pain after the blow, and then sobs.
Nicholas hesitated. Only a fool interferes between a man and his wife, and his reward usually is to have them unite and turn savagely upon him.
‘You must do something, Nicky, please.’
Reluctantly he swung his legs out of the cot and stood up. He slept in boxer shorts, and he did not bother to find his shoes. She followed him, also on bare feet, to the end of the grove where Boris’s tent stood b
eyond the dining tent.
There was a lantern still burning within, and it threw magnified shadows on the canvas walls. He saw that Boris had his wife by the hair and was dragging her across the floor, roaring at her in Russian.
‘Boris!’ Nicholas had to shout his name three times to get his attention, and then they saw the shadow play on the canvas as he dropped Tessay and flung open the tent flap.
He was dressed only in a pair of underpants. His torso was lean and muscular, the chest flat and hard-looking, covered with coppery curls. On the floor behind him Tessay lay face down, sobbing into her cupped hands. She was naked, and the planes of her body were sleek as those of a panther.
‘What the hell is going on here?’ Nicholas demanded, his anger only just beginning to stir as he witnessed the gracious, gentle woman’s distress and humiliation.
‘I am giving this black whore a lesson in good manners,’ Boris gloated, his face still swollen and flushed with drink and passion. ‘It’s none of your business, English, unless you want to pay some money and have a bit of pork for yourself.’ He laughed, an ugly sound.
‘Are you all right, Woizero Tessay?’ Nicholas looked directly into Boris’s face, sparing the woman the further humiliation of another man’s eyes on her nudity.
Tessay sat up, lifted her knees against her chest, and hugged them with both arms to cover her body.
‘It’s all right, Alto Nicholas. Please go away before there is real trouble.’ Blood was trickling from one nostril into her mouth, and dyeing her teeth pink.
‘You heard my wife, English bastard. Go away! Mind your own business. Go away, before I give you a little lesson in good manners also.’
Boris staggered forward and thrust his open hand against Nicholas’s chest. Nicholas moved as smoothly and as effortlessly as a matador avoiding the first wild charge of the bull. He swayed to one side, and used Boris’s own momentum to send him on in the direction in which he was already committed. Completely off balance, the Russian reeled across the open ground in front of the tent until he collided with one of the camp chairs and went down in a sprawling heap.
‘Royan, take Tessay to your tent!’ he ordered softly. Royan ran into the tent and pulled a sheet from the nearest cot. She spread it over Tessay’s shoulders and lifted her to her feet.
‘Please, don’t do this,’ Tessay sobbed. ‘You don’t know him when he gets like this. He will hurt somebody.’
Royan dragged her, still protesting and weeping, out of the tent, but by now Boris was on his feet again. He bellowed with rage and picked up the camp chair that had tripped him. With a single jerk he tore off one of the legs and hefted it in his bunched fist.
‘You want to play games, English? All right, we play!’ He rushed at Nicholas, swinging the chair leg like a Ninja baton, so that it hissed with the force with which he aimed it at his head. As Nicholas ducked under it Boris reversed the swing, going for the side of his chest, under his upraised arm. It would have staved in his ribs if it had landed, but again Nicholas twisted away.
They circled each other warily, and then Boris charged again. If it had not been for the effect of the vodka on the Russian’s reflexes Nicholas would never have taken a chance with an adversary of this calibre, but Boris was just loose enough in his control to allow him to duck in under the swinging chair leg. He straightened, with all his weight rolling into the punch, and his fist slogged into the pit of Boris’s belly just under the sternum. The Russian’s breath was driven out of him in a great gusty belch.
The chair leg flew from his grip, and he doubled over and collapsed. Clasping his middle, and heaving and wheezing for breath, Boris lay curled in the dust. Nicholas stooped over him and told him softly in English, ‘This sort of behaviour simply isn’t good enough, old chap. We don’t bully girls. Please don’t let it happen again.’
He straightened up and spoke to Royan, ‘Get her to your tent and keep her there.’ He combed his hair back from his face with his fingers. ‘And now, if you have no serious objections, may we get a little sleep?’
It rained again during the early hours. The heavy drops drummed down on the canvas and the lightning lit the interior of the tents with an eerie brilliance. However, by the time that Nicholas went through to the dining tent for breakfast the next morning, the clouds had cleared and the sunshine was bright and cheering. The sweet mountain air smelt of wet earth and mushrooms.
Boris greeted Nicholas with hearty good fellowship. ‘Good morning, English. We had some fun last night. I still laugh to remember it. Very good jokes. One day soon we will have some more vodka, then we will make some more good jokes.’ And he bellowed through to the kitchen tent, ‘Hey! Lady Sun, bring your new boyfriend something to eat. He is hungry from all the sport last night.’
Tessay was quiet and withdrawn as she supervised the servants handing round breakfast. One eye was swollen almost closed, and her lip was cut. She did not look at Nicholas once during the meal.
‘We will go on ahead,’ Boris explained jovially as they drank coffee. ‘My servants will break camp, and follow us in my big truck. With luck, we will be able to camp tonight on the rim above the gorge, and tomorrow we will begin the descent.’
As they were climbing into the truck, Tessay was able to speak to him softly for a moment, without danger of Boris overhearing her. ‘Thank you, Alto Nicholas. But it was not wise. You don’t know him. You must be careful now. He does not forget, nor does he forgive.’
From the village of Debra Maryam Boris took a branch road that ran alongside the Dandera river directly southwards. The road they had followed the previous day from Lake Tana was shown on the map as a major highway. It had been bad enough. But this track that they were now on was marked as a secondary road ‘not passable in all weather’. To compound matters, it seemed that most of the heavy traffic that had torn up the main road had followed this same track. They came to a place where some huge vehicle had become bogged down in the rain-saturated earth, and the efforts to free it had left areas of ploughed land and an excavation like a bomb crater that resembled an old photograph of the battlefields of First World War Flanders.
Twice during the day the Toyota too became stuck in this foul ground. Each time this happened, the big truck that was following them came up and all the servants swarmed down from the cargo body to push and heave the Toyota through. Even Nicholas stripped to the waist to work with them in the mud to free it.
‘If you had only listened to my advice,’ Boris grumbled, ‘we would not be here. There is no game where you want to go, and there are no roads worth the name either.’
In the early afternoon they stopped beside the river for an alfresco lunch. Nicholas went down to the pool beside the road to wash off the mud and filth of the morning’s labours. He had been in the forefront of the efforts to keep the truck moving. Royan followed him down the slope and perched on a rock above the pool while he stripped off his shirt and knelt at the verge to splash himself with the cold mountain water. The river was muddy yellow and swollen from the rainstorms.
‘I don’t think Boris believes your story about the striped dik-dik,’ she warned him. ‘Tessay tells me that he is suspicious of what we are up to.’ She watched with interest as he sluiced his chest and upper arms. Where the sun had not touched it, his skin was very white and unblemished. His chest hair was thick and dark. She decided that his body was good to look at.
‘He is the type that would go through our luggage if he gets a chance,’ Nicholas agreed. ‘You didn’t bring anything with you that has any clues for him? No papers or notes?’
‘Only the satellite photograph, and my notebooks are all in my own shorthand. He won’t be able to make anything of them.’
‘Be very careful of what you discuss with Tessay.’
‘She is a dear. There is nothing underhand about her.’ Heatedly Royan came to the defence of her new friend.
‘She may be all right, but she’s married to my chum Boris. Her first allegiance lies there. No matter
what your feelings towards her, don’t trust either of them.’ He dried himself on his shirt, slipped it on and then buttoned it over his chest. ‘Let’s go and get something to eat.’
Back at the parked truck Boris was pulling the cork from a bottle of South African white wine. He poured a tumblerful for Nicholas. Chilled in the river, it was crisp and fruity. Tessay offered them cold roast chicken and injera bread, the flat, thin sheets of stone-ground unleavened bread of the country. The trials and labours of the morning’s travels faded into insignificance as Royan lay beside Nicholas in the grass and they watched a bearded vulture sailing high against the blue. It saw them and drifted overhead curiously, twisting its head to look down at them. Its eyes were masked in black like those of a highwayman, and the distinctive wedge-shaped tail feathers flirted with the wind the way the fingers of a concert pianist would stroke the ivories of the keyboard.
When it was time to go on, Nicholas gave her his hand to lift her to her feet. It was one of their rare moments of physical contact, and she held on to his fingers for just a second or two longer than was strictly necessary.
There was no improvement in the surface of the track as they drew nearer to the rim of the gorge, and the hours passed in this bone-jarring, teeth-rattling progress. The track snaked over a rise and then dog-legged down the far slope. Halfway down Boris swore in Russian as they came round the hairpin bend of a high earthen bank to find a huge diesel truck slewed across the track, almost blocking it.
Even though they had been following the tracks of this convoy of vehicles since the previous day, this was the first of them that they had encountered, and it took Boris by surprise. He hit his brakes so suddenly that his passengers were almost catapulted from their seats, but on the steep incline in the mud the brakes did not bring them to a complete halt. Boris was forced to change down into his lowest gear and steer for the narrow gap between the bank and the truck.
From the back seat Royan looked out of the window beside her, up the high side of the diesel truck. There was a company name and logo emblazoned in scarlet on the green background.