by Wilbur Smith
As he passed her, Hansmeyer said quietly, ‘I’ll be within call, Mrs Courtney.’
In the silence that followed, Centaine and Lothar stared at each other, and it was she who gave in and spoke first.
‘If you set out to ruin me, then you have succeeded,’ she said, and he wriggled the stub of his missing arm, a gesture which was at once both pathetic and obscene.
‘Who has ruined whom, Centaine?’ he asked, and she dropped her eyes.
‘Won’t you give me back at least a part of what you have stolen from me?’ she asked. ‘For the sake of what we shared once long ago?’
He did not reply, but instead lifted his hand and touched the ancient puckered scar on his chest. She winced, for it was she who had fired that shot from the Luger pistol at the time of her disillusion and revulsion.
‘The boy has the diamonds, hasn’t he?’ she asked. ‘Your—’ she was about to say, ‘Your bastard?’ but she changed it: ‘Your son?’
Lothar remained silent and she went on impulsively: ‘Manfred, our son.’
‘I never thought I’d hear you say that.’ He could not disguise the pleasure in his tone. ‘Will you remember he is our son, conceived in love, when you are tempted to destroy him also?’
‘Why should you think I would do that?’
‘I know you, Centaine,’ he said.
‘No.’ She shook her head vehemently. ‘You do not know me.’
‘If he stands in your way, you will destroy him,’ he said, flatly.
‘Do you truly believe that?’ She stared at him. ‘Do you really believe that I am so ruthless, so vindictive, that I would take my revenge on my own son?’
‘You have never acknowledged him as that.’
‘I have now. You have heard me do it more than once in the last few minutes.’
‘Are you promising me that you will not harm him?’
‘I do not have to promise you, Lothar De La Rey. I am merely saying it. I will not harm Manfred.’
‘And naturally you expect something from me in return,’ he demanded, leaning forward. He was breathing with difficulty, sweating with the effort of fighting off his physical weakness. His sweat had a rank and sour smell in the gloomy confines of the hut.
‘Would you offer me anything in return?’ she asked quietly.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing!’ And he sank back against the bolster, exhausted but defiant. ‘Now let me hear you withdraw your promise.’
‘I made no promise,’ she said quietly. ‘But, I repeat, Manfred, our son, is safe from me. I will never deliberately do anything to harm him. I do not give you the same assurance, however.’
She turned and called. ‘Thank you, Sergeant, we have finished our business.’ And she stooped to leave.
‘Centaine—’ he cried weakly, and he wanted to tell her, ‘Your diamonds are in the cleft on the summit of the hill.’ But when she turned back he bit down on the words and said only, ‘Goodbye, Centaine. It is finished at last.’
The Okavango is one of Africa’s most beautiful rivers. It rises in the highlands of the Angolan plateau above 4,000 feet and flows south and east, a wide deep torrent of green water that it seems must reach the ocean, so swift and determined is its flow. However, it is a landlocked river, debouching first into the mis-named Okavango Swamps, a vast area of lucid lagoons and papyrus banks, studded with islets on which graceful ivory nut palms and great wild figs stand tall. Beyond that the river emerges again but shrivelled and weakened as it enters the desolation of the Kalahari Desert and disappears for ever beneath those eternal sands.
This section of the river that Centaine and Blaine set out upon was that above the swamps where the river was at its grandest. Their craft was a native mukoro, a dugout canoe fashioned from a single treetrunk over twenty feet long, rounded but not perfectly straight.
‘The owl and the pussy cat put to sea in a beautiful banana-shaped boat,’ quoth Blaine, and Centaine laughed a little apprehensively until she saw how masterfully their paddlers handled the misshapen craft.
They were two amiable coal-black giants of the river tribe. They had the balance of gymnasts and their bodies were forged and hardened to Grecian perfection by a lifetime of wielding their paddles and their long punting poles. They stood at the stern and bows, singing their melodious work chant and trimming their narrow unstable craft with a relaxed, almost instinctive ease.
Amidships Blaine and Centaine lolled on cushions of rawhide stuffed with the fluffy heads of the papyrus reeds. The narrow beam forced them to sit in tandem, with Blaine in the lead, his Lee Enfield rifle across his lap ready to discourage the close approach of any of the numerous hippopotami which infested the river. ‘The most dangerous animal in Africa by far,’ he told Centaine.
‘What about lions and elephants and poisonous snakes?’ she challenged.
‘The old hippo gets two humans for every one killed by all the other species put together.’
This was Centaine’s first venture into these parts. She was a creature of the desert, unacquainted with the river or the swamps, unfamiliar with the boundless life they supported. Blaine, on the other hand, knew the river well. He had first been ordered here when serving with General Smuts’ expeditionary force in 1915 and had since returned often to hunt and study the wildlife of the region. He seemed to recognize every animal and bird and plant, and he had a hundred stories, both true and apocryphal, with which to amuse her.
The mood of the river changed constantly; at places it narrowed and raced through rock-lined gaps and the long canoe flew like a lance upon it. The paddlers directed it past outcrops of fanged rock upon which the current humped up and split, and with delicate touches of the paddles took them through the creaming whirlpools beyond and into the next flying stretch where the surface was moulded like green Venetian glass into standing waves by its own speed and momentum. Centaine whooped breathlessly, half in terror and half in exhilaration, like a child on a roller coaster. Then they emerged onto broad shallow stretches, the flow broken by islands and sandbanks and bordered by wide flood plains on which grazed herds of wild buffalo, massive indolent-seeming beasts, black as hell and crusted with dried mud, great bossed horns drooping mournfully over their trumpet-shaped ears, standing belly-deep in the flood plains, lifting their black drooling muzzles in comical curiosity to watch them pass.
‘Oh Blaine! What are those? I’ve never seen them before.’
‘Lechwe. This is as far south as you will find them.’
There were vast herds of these robust water antelope with coarse wiry red coats, the rams standing as tall as a man’s chest and carrying long gracefully recurved horns. The hornless ewes were fluffy as children’s toys. So dense were the herds that when they fled from the human presence they churned the water until it sounded like the thunderous passage of a steam locomotive heard at a distance.
On nearly every tall tree along the river’s banks were posted pairs of fish eagles, their white heads shining in the sunlight. They threw back their heads, belling out their throats to chant their weird yelping call as the mukoro glided past.
On the white sandbanks the long saurian shapes of the crocodiles were silhouetted, ugly and evil as they lifted themselves on their stubby deformed legs and waddled swiftly to the water’s edge, then slipping away below the surface, only the twin knobs of their scaly eyebrows still showing.
In the shallows clusters of smooth rounded boulders, dark grey edged with baby pink, caught Centaine’s attention, but she did not recognize them until Blaine warned:
‘Watch them!’ and the paddlers sheered off as one of the huge boulders moved, raising a head the size of a beer keg, gaping red, the mighty jaws lined with tusks of yellow ivory, and it bellowed at them with the deep sardonical laughter of a demented god.
Blaine shifted the rifle slightly. ‘Don’t be taken in by that jovial haw haw haw – he isn’t really amused,’ he told Centaine as he worked the bolt and pushed a cartridge into the breech.
As he spoke
the bull hippo charged at them through the shallows, breaking the water into white foam with his elephantine bounds, blaring his hoarse menacing laughter, his jaws gaping, clashing the long curved yellow ivories whose razor edges could scythe the thick fibrous papyrus stems, or crush in the frail sides of a mukoro, or cut a swimming man into two pieces with equal ease.
The mukoro drove forward under the long powerful thrusts of the two oarsmen, but the hippopotamus gained on them rapidly and Blaine sprang to his feet, balancing in the unstable craft. He lifted the rifle to his shoulder and fired so rapidly that the reports blended together, and Centaine flinched at the whiplash of gunfire over her head and looked back, expecting to see the bullets strike on the great fleshy grey head and blood spurt from between those glassy pinkshot little eyes. But Blaine had aimed inches over the beast’s forehead. The bristly ears twitched and fluttered like sunbirds’ wings to the shock of passing shot, and the bull broke his charge and came up short, just his head showing above the surface, blinking rapidly with comical astonishment. The mukoro pulled swiftly away, and the bull submerged in a huge swirl of green water as if to cover his embarrassment at his own ineffectual performance.
‘Are you all right, Centaine?’ Blaine lowered the rifle.
‘That was a little frosty.’ She tried to keep her voice level with only partial success.
‘Not as bad as it seemed – sound and fury, not too much of the deadly intent.’ He smiled at her.
‘I’m glad you didn’t kill him.’
‘Not much point in turning the old boy into four tons of rotting carrion and making twenty widows of his fat wives.’
‘Is that why he chased us – protecting his females?’
‘Probably, but you can never tell with wild animals. Perhaps one of his cows is calving, or he has unpleasant memories of human hunters, or perhaps he just felt plain bolshy today.’
His coolness in crisis had impressed her almost as much as his humanity in sparing the threatening beast.
‘Only schoolgirls worship their heroes,’ she reminded herself firmly as the canoe sped onwards, and then found herself studying the breadth of Blaine’s shoulders and the way he held his head upon them. His dark hair was cut short down the back of his neck, and his neck was strong but not bulled, pleasingly proportioned and smooth, only his ears were too large, and the tips were pink where the sunlight seemed to shine through them. She felt an almost irresistible urge to lean forward and kiss the soft skin just behind where they jutted out, but she controlled herself with a giggle.
He turned and demanded with a smile, ‘What’s so funny?’
‘A girl always feels weak and giggly after Prince Charming saves her from a fire-breathing dragon.’
‘Mythical creatures, dragons.’
‘Don’t scoff,’ she chided him. ‘Anything is possible here, even dragons and princes. This is never-never land. Santa Claus and the good fairy are waiting just around the next bend.’
‘You are just a little bit crazy, do you know that?’
‘Yes, I know that,’ she nodded. ‘And I think I should warn you, it’s both contagious and infectious.’
‘Your warning comes too late.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I think I’ve caught it already.’
‘Good,’ she said, and giving in to her whim, she leaned forward and kissed that soft spot behind his ear.
He shivered theatrically. ‘Now look what you’ve done.’ He turned again and showed her the gooseflesh standing in little pimples on his forearms. ‘You must promise never to do that again. It’s too dangerous.’
‘Like you, I never make promises.’ She saw the quick shadow of regret and guilt in his eyes and cursed herself for alluding to his lack of commitment to her and thereby spoiling the mood.
‘Oh, Blaine, look at those birds. Surely they aren’t real are they? It proves me right, this is never-never land.’ She tried to retrieve the mood.
They were drifting past a high sheer bank of red clay bright as a blood orange that was perforated by thousands of perfectly round apertures, and a living swirling cloud of marvellously coloured birds hung over the bank, darting in and out of the myriad entrances to their nesting burrows.
‘Carmine bee-eaters,’ Blaine told her, sharing her wonder at the glory of the flashing darts of flaming pink and turquoise blue, with their long delicately streaming tail feathers and pointed wingtips sharp as stilettos. ‘They are so unearthly, I am beginning to believe you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we have indeed passed through the mirror.’
They spoke little after that, but somehow their silences seemed to bring them even closer. They only touched once more when Centaine laid her hand, palm open, along the side of his neck, and for a moment he covered her hand with his own, a gentle fleeting exchange.
Then Blaine spoke briefly to the leading oarsman.
‘What is it, Blaine?’ she asked.
‘I told him to find a good place to camp for the night.’
‘Isn’t it still very early?’ She glanced at the sun.
‘Yes.’ He turned and smiled at her, almost sheepishly. ‘But then I’m trying for the record trip between Cuangar and Runtu.’
‘The record?’
‘Slowest journey ever.’
Blaine chose one of the large islands. The white sandbar folded upon itself to form a secret lagoon, clear and green and screened by tall waving papyrus. While the two paddlers piled driftwood for the fire and cut papyrus fronds to thatch night shelters for them, Blaine picked up his rifle.
‘Where are you going?’ Centaine asked.
‘See if I can get a buck for dinner.’
‘Oh, Blaine, please don’t kill anything, not today. Not this special day.’
‘Aren’t you tired of bully beef?’
‘Please,’ she insisted and he set his rifle aside with a smile and a rueful shake of his head and went to make sure that the huts were ready and the mosquito nets rigged over each separate bed. Satisfied, Blaine dismissed the paddlers and they climbed into the mukoro.
‘Where are they off to?’ Centaine demanded as they poled out into the current.
‘I told them to camp on the mainland,’ Blaine answered, and they each looked away, suddenly awkward and shy and intensely aware of their isolation as they stared after the departing canoe.
Centaine turned and walked back to the camp. She knelt beside her saddle bags, which were her only luggage, and without looking up told him, ‘I haven’t bathed since last night. I’m going to swim in the lagoon.’ She had a bar of yellow soap in her hand.
‘Do you have a last message for the folks back home?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘This is the Okavango river, Centaine. The crocodiles here gobble little girls as hors d’oeuvres.’
‘You could stand guard with the rifle—’
‘Delighted to oblige.’
‘ – and with your eyes closed!’
‘Rather defeats the object, doesn’t it?’
He scouted the edge of the lagoon and found shallow water below an outcropping of black water-polished rock where the bottom was white sand and an approaching crocodile would show clearly, and he sat on the highest pinnacle of rock with the Lee Enfield loaded and the safety-catch off.
‘You are on your honour not to peek,’ she warned, standing on the beach below him, and he concentrated on a flock of spur-wing geese flogging their heavy wings as they passed across the lowering sun, but acutely aware of the rustle of her falling clothing.
He heard the water ripple, and her little gasp and then, ‘All right, now you can watch for crocodiles.’
She was sitting on the sandy bottom, just her head above the surface, her back towards him and her hair scraped up and tied on top of her head.
‘It’s heavenly, so cool and refreshing.’ She smiled over her shoulder, and he could see the gleam of her white flesh through the green water and he thought he might not be able to bear the pain of his wanting. He knew that she was deliberately provoking him, but
he could neither resist her nor steel himself against her wiles.
Isabella Malcomess had been thrown from her horse almost five years previously, and since then they had not known each other as man and woman. They had attempted it only once, but he could not bear to think about the agony and humiliation they had both suffered at their failure.
He had a healthy lusty body and a huge appetite for living. It had taken all his strength and determination to discipline himself to this unnatural monastic existence. He had succeeded at last, so that he was now unprepared for the savage escape of all those fettered desires and instincts.
‘Eyes closed again,’ she called gaily. ‘I’m going to stand and work up some suds.’
He was unable to reply; he only just contained the groan that came up his throat, and he stared down fixedly at the rifle in his lap.
Centaine screamed on a wild rising note of terror. ‘Blaine!’
He was on his feet in that instant. Centaine was standing thigh deep, the green water just lapping the deep cleft of her small round buttocks, the naked swell of her hips narrowing into a tiny waist. Her exquisitively sculpted back and shoulders were stiff with horror.
The crocodile was coming in from deep water with slashing sweeps of its long cockscombed tail, a bow wave spreading back from its hideous armoured snout in a sharp arrowhead of ripples. The reptile was almost as long as the mukoro, twenty feet from its nose to the tip of its crested tail.
‘Run, Centaine, run!’ he bellowed, and she whirled and floundered back towards him. But the reptile was moving as swiftly as a horse at full gallop, the water breaking into a roiling wake behind it, and Centaine was blocking Blaine’s aim, running directly back towards him.
Blaine sprang down from the rock and waded knee-deep into the water to meet her, his rifle held at high port across his chest.
‘Down!’ he shouted at her. ‘Fall flat!’ And she responded instantly, diving forward at full length, and he fired over her back, a snap shot for the huge reptile was almost upon her.
The bullet cracked against the armoured scales of its hideous skull. The crocodile arched its back, exploding out of the water, drenching Blaine and covering Centaine in a breaking wave of foam. It stood on its massive tail, its dwarfed forelegs clawing desperately, its creamy belly chequered with symmetrical patterns of scales, the long angular snout pointed to the sky, and with a bellow it collapsed over backwards.