by Wilbur Smith
She was like a wraith in the moonlight, silvery and ethereal, and he heaved himself to his feet and crushed out the cigarette.
‘Annalisa!’ he called, his voice low and quivering with the need of her.
She stopped just out of reach before him, and when he lunged for her she danced away lightly and laughed with a mocking tinkle.
‘Five pounds, Meneer,’ she reminded him, and drew nearer as he fumbled the crumpled bank notes out of his back pocket. She took them and held them up to the moon. Then, satisfied, tucked them away in her clothing and stepped boldly up to him.
He seized her around the waist and covered her mouth with his wet lips. She broke away at last, laughing breathlessly, and held his wrist as he reached under her skirt.
‘Do you want the other pound’s worth?’
‘It’s too much,’ he panted. ‘I haven’t got that much.’
‘Ten shillings, then,’ she offered, and touched the front of his body with a small cunning hand.
‘Half a crown,’ he gasped. ‘That’s all I have got.’ And she stared at him, still touching him, and saw she could get no more out of him.
‘All right, give it to me,’ she agreed, and hid the coin before she went down on her knees in front of him as though for his blessing. He placed both hands on her curly sunstreaked head and drew her towards him, bowing his head over her and then closing his eyes.
Something hard was thrust into his ribs from behind with such force that the wind was driven from his lungs and a voice grated in his ear.
‘Tell the little bitch to disappear.’ The voice was low and dangerous and dreadfully familiar.
The girl leaped to her feet, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. She stared for an instant over Fourie’s shoulder with wide terrified eyes, then whirled and raced up the ravine towards the camp on long flying legs.
Fourie fumbled clumsily with his clothing and turned to face the man who stood behind him with the Mauser rifle pointed at his belly.
‘De La Rey!’ he blurted.
‘Were you expecting somebody else?’
‘No! No!’ Fourie shook his head wildly. ‘It’s just – so soon.’ Since last they had met Fourie had had time to repent of their bargain. Cowardice had won the long battle over avarice, and because he wanted it so he had convinced himself that Lothar De La Rey’s scheme was like so many others that he had dreamed about, merely one of those fantasies with which those for ever doomed to poverty and futile labour consoled themselves.
He had expected, and hoped, never to hear of Lothar De La Rey again. But now he stood before him, tall and deadly with his head shining like a beacon in the moonlight and topaz lights glinting in those leopard eyes.
‘Soon?’ Lothar asked. ‘So soon? It’s been weeks, my old and dear friend. It all took longer to arrange than I expected.’ Then Lothar’s voice hardened as he asked, ‘Have you taken the diamond shipment into Windhoek yet?’
‘No, not yet—’ Fourie broke off, and silently reviled himself. That would have been his escape. He should have said ‘Yes! I took it in myself last week.’ But it was done, and miserably he hung his head and concentrated on fastening the last buttons of his breeches. Those few words spoken too hastily might yet cost him a lifetime in prison and he was afraid.
‘When will the shipment go in?’ Lothar placed the muzzle of the Mauser under Fourie’s chin and lifted his face to the moon. He wanted to watch the man’s eyes. He did not trust him.
‘They have delayed it. I don’t know how long. I heard some rumour that they have to send in a big package of stones.’
‘Why?’ Lothar asked softly, and Fourie shrugged.
‘I just heard it will be a big package.’
‘As I warned you, it’s because they are going to close the mine.’ Lothar watched his face carefully. He sensed that the man was wavering. He had to steel him. ‘It will be the last shipment, and then you will be out of work. Just like those poor bastards you have on your trucks.’
Fourie nodded glumly. ‘Yes, they have fired them.’
‘It will be you next, old friend. And you told me what a good family man you are, how much you love your family.’
‘Ja.’
‘Then no more money to feed your children, no money to clothe them, not even a few pounds to pay the little girls for their clever tricks.’
‘Man, you mustn’t talk like that.’
‘You do what we agreed and there will be all the little girls you want, any way you want them.’
‘Don’t talk like that. It’s dirty, man.’
‘You know the arrangements. You know what to do just as soon as they tell you when the shipment is going in.’
Fourie nodded but Lothar insisted. ‘Tell me about it. Repeat it to me.’ And he listened while Fourie reluctantly recited his instructions, correcting him once on a detail, and at last smiled with satisfaction.
‘Don’t let us down, old friend. I do not like to be disappointed.’ He leaned close to Fourie and stared into his eyes, then quite suddenly turned and slipped away into the moon shadows.
Fourie shuddered and stumbled away up the ravine towards the camp like a drunkard. He was almost there before he remembered that the girl had his money but had not completed her part of the bargain. He wondered if he could talk her into doing so at the next camp, and then morosely decided that his chances were not very good. Yet somehow it didn’t seem so urgent now. The ice that Lothar De La Rey had injected into his blood seemed to have settled in his loins.
They rode through the open forest below the cliffs, and their mood was carefree and gay with anticipation of the days that lay ahead.
Shasa rode Prester John, with the 7mm Mannlicher sporting rifle in the leather scabbard under his left knee. It was a beautiful weapon, the butt and foregrip in choice selected walnut, and the blue steel engraved and inlaid with silver and pure gold: hunting scenes exquisitely rendered and Shasa’s name scripted in precious metal. The rifle had been a fourteenth birthday present from his grandfather.
Centaine rode her grey stallion, a magnificent animal. His hide was marbled with black in a lacy pattern across his shoulders and croup, while his mane and muzzle and eye patches were also shiny jet black, in startling contrast to the snowy hide beneath. She called him Nuage, Cloud, after a stallion that her father had given her when she was a girl.
Centaine wore an Australian cattleman’s wide-brimmed hat and a kudu-skin gilet over her shirt. There was a yellow silk scarf knotted loosely at her throat, and a sparkle in her eyes.
‘Oh, Shasa, I feel like a schoolgirl playing hookey! We’ve got two whole days to ourselves.’
‘Race you to the spring!’ he challenged her, but Prester John was no match for Nuage and when they reached the spring Centaine had already dismounted and was holding the stallion’s head to prevent him bloating himself with water.
They remounted and rode on deeper into the wilderness of the Kalahari. The further they went from the mine the less had been the intrusion of human presence, and the wild life more abundant and confident.
Centaine had been trained in the ways of the wild by the finest of all instructors, the wild Bushmen of the San, and she had lost none of her skills. It was not only the larger game that engaged her. She pointed out a pair of quaint little bat-eared foxes that Shasa would have missed. They were hunting grasshoppers in the sparse silver grass, pricking their enormous ears as they crept forward in a pantomime of stealth before the heroic leap onto their formidable prey. They laid their tell-tale ears against their fluffy necks and flattened against the earth as the horses passed.
They startled a yellow sand-cat from an ant-bear burrow, and so intent was the big cat on its escape that it ran headlong into the sticky yellow web of a crab spider. The animal’s comical efforts to wipe the web from its face with both front paws while at the same time continuing its flight had them both reeling in the saddle.
Once in the middle of the afternoon they spotted a herd of stately gemsbok trottin
g in single file across the horizon. They held their heads high, the long straight slender horns transformed by distance and the angle of view into the single straight horn of the unicorn. The mirage turned them into strange long-legged monsters and then swallowed them up completely.
As the lowering sun painted the desert with shadow and fresh colour, Centaine picked out another small herd of springbok and pointed out a plump young ram to Shasa. ‘We are only half a mile from camp and we need our dinner.’
Eagerly Shasa drew the Mannlicher from its scabbard.
‘Cleanly!’ she cautioned him. It troubled her a little to see how he enjoyed the chase.
She stayed back and watched him dismount. Using Prester John as a stalking horse, Shasa angled in towards the herd. Prester John understood his role and kept himself between Shasa and the game, even pausing to graze when the springbok became restless, only moving closer when they had settled down again.
At two hundred paces Shasa squatted and braced his elbows on his knees, and Centaine felt a rush of relief as the springbok ram dropped instantly to the shot. She had once seen Lothar De La Rey gut shoot one of the lovely gazelle. The memory still haunted her.
When she rode up she saw that Shasa had hit the animal cleanly behind the shoulder, and the bullet had passed through the heart. She watched critically as Shasa dressed out the game the way Sir Garry had taught him.
‘Keep all the offal,’ she told him. ‘The servants love the tripes.’ So he wrapped it in the wet skin and bundled the carcass up onto Prester John’s back and tied it behind the saddle.
The camp was at the foot of the hills, below a seep well in the cliff which provided water. The previous day Centaine had sent three servants ahead with the pack horses and the camp was comfortable and secure.
They dined on grilled kebabs of liver, kidneys and heart, larded with laces of fat from the springbok’s belly cavity. Then they sat late at the fire, drinking coffee that tasted of wood smoke, talking quietly and watching the moon rise.
In the dawn they rode out, bundled in sheepskin jackets against the chill. They had not gone a mile before Centaine pulled up Nuage’s head and leaned far out of the saddle to examine the earth.
‘What is it, Mater?’ Shasa was always sensitive to every nuance of her moods, and he saw how excited she was.
‘Come quickly, chéri.’ She pointed out the tracks in the soft earth. ‘What do you make of these?’
Shasa swung down from the saddle and stooped over the sign.
‘Human beings?’ He was puzzled. ‘But so small. Children?’ He looked up at her, and her shining expression gave him the clue.
‘Bushmen!’ he exclaimed. ‘Wild Bushmen.’
‘Oh yes,’ she laughed. ‘A pair of hunters. They are after a giraffe. Look! Their tracks are overlaying those of the quarry.’
‘Can we follow them, Mater? Can we?’ Now Shasa was as excited as she was.
Centaine agreed. ‘Their spoor is only a day old. We can catch them if we hurry.’
Centaine rode on the spoor with Shasa trailing behind her, careful not to spoil the sign. He had never seen her work like this, taking it at a canter over the bad places where even his sharp young eyes could see nothing.
‘Look, a Bushman toothbrush.’ She pointed to a fresh twig, the end chewed to a brush, that lay discarded beside the spoor and they rode on.
‘This is where they first spotted the giraffe.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘They have strung their bows. There are the marks of the butts.’
The little men had pressed the tips of their bows against the earth to arch them.
‘Look, Shasa, now they have begun stalking.’
He could see no change in the spoor and said so.
‘Shorter and stealthier paces – weight forward on the toes,’ she explained, and then, a few hundred paces farther, ‘Here they went down on their bellies, snake-crawling in for the kill. Here they went up on their knees to loose their arrows, and here they leapt to their feet to watch them strike.’ Twenty paces farther on she exclaimed, ‘See how close they were to the quarry. This is where the giraffe felt the sting of the barbs and started to gallop – look how the hunters followed at a run, waiting for the poison of the arrows to take effect.’
They galloped along the line of the chase until Centaine rose in the stirrups and pointed ahead.
‘Vultures!’
Four or five miles ahead the blue of the heavens was dusted with a fine cloud of black specks. The cloud turned in slow vortex, high above the earth.
‘Slowly now, chéri,’ Centaine cautioned him. ‘It could be dangerous if we frighten and panic them.’
They brought the horses down to a walk and rode up slowly to the site of the kill.
The giraffe’s huge carcass, partly flayed and dismembered, lay on its side. Against the surrounding thorn bushes crude sunshelters of thatch had been erected, and the bushes were festooned with strips of meat and ribbons of entrails set out to dry in the sun, the branches bowed under their weight.
The area was widely trodden by small feet.
‘They have brought the women and children to help cut up and carry,’ Centaine said.
‘Phew! It pongs terribly!’ Shasa screwed up his nose. ‘Where are they, anyway?’
‘Hiding,’ Centaine said. ‘They saw us coming, probably from five miles away.’ She stood up in the stirrups and swept the broad-brimmed hat from her head to show her face more clearly, and she called out in a strange guttural clicking tongue, turning slowly and repeating the message to every quarter of the silent brooding desert that encompassed them.
‘It’s creepy.’ Shasa shivered involuntarily in the bright sunlight. ‘Are you sure they are still here?’
‘They’re watching us. They aren’t in a hurry.’
Then a man rose out of the earth so close to them that the stallion shied and nodded his head nervously. The man wore only a loincloth of animal skin. He was a small man, yet perfectly formed, with elegant and graceful limbs built for running. Hard muscle lay flat down his chest and sculpted his naked belly into the same ripples that the ebb tide leaves on a sandy beach.
He held his head proudly, and though he was clean-shaven, it was evident he was in the full flowering of his manhood. His eyes had a Mongolian slant to the corners and his skin glowed with a marvellous amber colour seeming almost translucent in the sunlight.
He lifted his right hand in a greeting and a sign of peace and he called, birdlike and high, ‘I see you, Nam Child,’ using Centaine’s Bushman name, and she cried aloud for joy.
‘I see you also, Kwi!’
‘Who is with you?’ the bushman demanded.
‘This is my son, Good Water. As I told you when first we met, he was born in the holy place of your people and O’wa was his adopted grandfather and H’ani was his grandmother.’
Kwi, the Bushman, turned and called out into the empty desert. ‘This is the truth, oh people of the San. This woman is Nam Child, our friend, and the boy is he of the legend. Greet them!’
Out of the seemingly barren earth against which they had hidden rose the little golden people of the San. With Kwi there were twelve of them; two men, Kwi and his brother Fat Kwi, their wives and the naked children. They had hidden with all the art of wild creatures, but now they crowded forward chirruping and clicking and laughing and Centaine swung down from the saddle to meet and embrace them, greeting each of them by name and finally picking up two of the toddlers and holding one on each hip.
‘How do you know them so well, Mater?’ Shasa wanted to know.
‘Kwi and his brother are related to O’wa, your adopted Bushman grandfather. I first met them when you were very small and we were developing the H’ani Mine. These are their hunting grounds.’
They passed the rest of that day with the clan, and when it was time to leave Centaine gave each of the women a handful of brass 7mm cartidges and they shrieked with joy and danced their thanks. The cartridges would
be strung with ostrich shell beads into necklaces that would make them the envy of every other San woman they met in their wandering. Shasa gave Kwi his ivory-handled hunting knife and the little man tried the edge with his thumb and grunted with wonder as the skin parted, and he displayed the bloody thumb proudly to each of the women.
‘What a weapon I have now.’
Fat Kwi got Centaine’s belt, and they left him studying the reflection of his own face in the polished brass buckle.
‘If you wish to visit us again,’ Kwi called after them, ‘we will be at the mongongo tree grove near O’chee Pan until the rains break.’
‘They are so happy with so little,’ Shasa said, looking back at the tiny dancing figures.
‘They are the happiest people in this earth,’ Centaine agreed. ‘But I wonder for how much longer.’
‘Did you truly live like that, Mater?’ Shasa asked. ‘Like a Bushman? Did you really wear skins and eat roots?’
‘So did you, Shasa. Or rather you wore nothing at all just like one of those grubby little scamps.’
He frowned with the effort of memory. ‘Sometimes I dream about a dark place, like a cave with water that smoked.’
‘That was the thermal spring in which we bathed, and in which I found the first diamond of the H’ani Mine.’
‘I would like to visit it again, Mater.’
‘That isn’t possible.’ He saw her mood change. ‘The spring was in the centre of the H’ani pipe, in what is now the main excavation of the mine. We dug it out and destroyed the spring.’ They rode on in silence for a while. ‘It was the holy place of the San – and yet, strangely, they did not seem to resent it when we,’ she hesitated over the word and then said it firmly, ‘when we desecrated it.’
‘I wonder why. I mean if some strange race turned Westminster Abbey into a diamond mine!’
‘A long time ago I discussed it with Kwi. He said that the secret place belonged not to them but the spirits and if the spirits had not wanted it so they would not have let it happen. He said the spirits had lived there so long that perhaps they were bored and wished to move on to another home, just like the San do.’