by Kate Roman
“Rest.” Roy laid a restraining hand on Ash’s arm.
“I’d rather be a help than a burden. That is, if you’ll allow me to?” Ash looked at Roy uncertainly. “I expect I’m in the way.”
“You’re not in the way at all, and later, when you’re well, I’ll be glad of your help. For now, though, the most important thing for you is to heal.” Roy forced himself to turn away, pulling his shirt over his head. “This morning, I have little to do anyhow. The animals’ pens must be cleaned. I have maize to boil for tomorrow’s porridge, and I’ll prepare more soup for our evening meal. I’ve formed the habit of resting in the heat of the day. Nothing for you to do but sleep. Call out if you need anything—I’ll hear you.” Roy risked a glance at the young man on the bed.
Ash was laid out across the cot, hands behind his head. His chest rose and fell as he breathed, rippling the muscles in his abdomen. His gaze lingered on Roy’s naked torso, and his expression was both appreciative and speculative.
Roy stared for a moment, then turned and swung out of the hut. Their first meeting burned in his brain, but for now, Ash was injured, alone. In his care.
Ash slept through most of the day. Roy checked on him often, a little worried so much sleeping might herald the onset of fever or worse, but Ash’s skin remained cool to the touch. Each time the young man woke, he was lucid and if not pain-free, then certainly no worse.
Roy brought the animals in from the veldt in the late afternoon and had barely finished penning them when he heard voices. Many natives were shouting all at once, their cries rising disjointedly in the afternoon heat.
Roy headed for the wired thornbush gate to his stockade.
It was possible natives were bringing a sick or wounded tribe member for treatment, but Roy didn’t think so. Such visits had never been heralded by shouting before.
A group of local tribesmen stood just outside the gate, and they quieted as Roy appeared. Roy sensed an undercurrent of nervousness in the group, like heat lightning, building in a storm cloud.
An old, wizened man stepped to the front of the group. “I am Watipa. We have come from Thornside.”
Roy nodded. He’d met Watipa once before and cured his son of a fever.
“Haywood’s nephew, the son of his brother. Chapungu took him.” Watipa nodded sagely, looking to the rest of the group for approval. There was a chorus of assent. “Haywood won’t believe us. He has no rukudzo.”
Rukudzo…respect. Roy nodded again. Gerald Haywood had no damned rukudzo for anyone or anything. “But why’ve you come here?”
“Come with us. Tell how chapungu took the brother’s son to the spirit world. Haywood will believe you.” Watipa hesitated, and Roy understood. Gerald Haywood would believe Roy for the sole fact that he was white.
Yet Roy knew Haywood wouldn’t believe anything he said, white or not. “It’s not that simple.”
The natives all started talking at once, and Roy stopped listening, instead searching the wide sky for an answer. He idly swatted at a mosquito on his neck. Off in the far distance, nearly at the edge of hearing, a lion roared at the shimmering twilight heat, and everyone fell silent.
After the growls died away, Roy said simply: “The boy was taken by a lion.”
Watipa cleared his throat. “Chapungu—”
Roy held up his hand, turned, and headed back to the hut. At the base of the leather curtain lay Ash’s torn and bloody shirt. As Roy grabbed it, he said quietly, “Don’t worry. I’ll be right back.”
There was no answer. Roy hesitated a moment, then turned and jogged back to the gate. He held the shredded fabric out to the natives. “Lion.”
Two of the younger men took the shirt, and the group started shouting again. Watipa held his hands up for silence. “Chapungu takes the spirit. What the lion eats is just the husk.” Watipa used the Karanga word meaning “skin of the maize cob.” Roy shuddered.
Watipa’s proclamation was greeted with shouts of agreement, and the party headed off into the gathering dusk, bearing the shirt as their prize. Roy watched them go for a moment, then turned back to the hut, and Ash.
But the hut was empty. The window was barely wide enough for a man to crawl through; Roy should know, he’d designed it himself with that purpose in mind, in case of ambush. But the mosquito netting was carefully fastened. No one had gone that way. And no one had left by the door. Roy felt as if a giant hand held his heart in its fist, squeezing.
Roy searched the compound three times to be sure, then turned his attention to the veldt. Ash was a man, and men didn’t vanish into thin air.
Roy strode out the gate, staring around him, then threw his head back and roared a challenge to the night. After a few seconds came a lion's answering snarl, far too close for comfort.
Roy breathed the night air, alert to danger but unafraid of it. He had long since stopped fearing the veldt’s big cats; after what he’d done to get back from the war alive, Roy figured he was the biggest predator out here. But if Ash was out here with lions so close… Roy’s heart began to pound. Rifle slung across his shoulder, he started out into the veldt.
Chapter Five
Ash limped across the wide plain, unmindful of the setting sun. The sky gradually burned away above and all around him, but all he knew was what drove him onward. Thornside. He’d heard the group at the gate, come to take him back. His blood had run cold at hearing a reminder of the past he so desperately sought to flee. The past that had nearly killed him.
Roy.
Ash’s thoughts were consumed by the memory of Roy’s hands on his skin, Roy’s arms holding him close. The life Sir Roland wanted for him was unthinkable now. He’d tried to be the son his father had demanded, but now he’d seen the truth. And he had no intention of letting that life consume Roy too. He’d run, find someplace to hide until the search party passed, leaving no sign that Roy had given shelter to their quarry. If Ash could do nothing else right, he could at least keep Roy safe from his family’s wrath.
For a moment, Ash imagined he heard the whistle of the horsewhip again, but this time, he saw it strike Roy, carving a stripe across his rescuer’s tautly muscled torso.
No! Ash caught his foot in the entrance to the burrow of some small mammal and fell, crashing heavily to the hard, sandy ground. He lay stunned for a moment, too tired and raw even to weep.
The orange sun-glow was quickly burning off, the sky falling as night rose up around him. Ash pushed himself up on his arms then staggered to his feet, absently brushing grit from the bare skin of his stomach and chest. His fingers came away bloody; he’d reopened his wounds. It didn’t matter; he felt nothing but the urge to run.
All that mattered now was being nowhere near Roy, leaving nothing that could incriminate the good man who’d saved him.
Then close by, a lion’s roar tore through the night.
Ash froze.
The sound ripped through him, carrying him along with its force and touching him somewhere deep inside.
Some small part of Ash’s brain registered the threat of predators, the danger posed to him, one lone man in the middle of the African grasslands. I should be afraid. He and fear were no strangers, certainly. And yet…
The longer he stood under the vast, dark firmament, the more sure he felt, the more secure. He heard the lions and felt their voices resonate within him. Felt them touch some hidden part of himself long dormant, and change it. Like the sharp snick of a twig underfoot or a bone breaking, a moment of release.
The lions roared again, answered this time by a Greek chorus of cackling hyenas, and yet the pain didn’t come. No attack, no terror, just a subtle, almost sublime shifting of the world on its axis, a rippling of the fabric of the universe, nature setting itself to rights. It was as if something that had been locked away was suddenly freed. If nothing else, Ash could understand the need of all wild things for freedom.
Ash sank to his knees in the dust. He could hear it all now, could feel the complex panoply of the veldt rush through
him, calling to him. And Ash knew with every fiber of his being: something within him longed to call back, to roar both challenge and acceptance to the wild African night.
The grass rustled near a stand of trees to his right as something big slid through the evening toward him. Something very big.
Show yourself. Ash felt and heard the words in his chest, in a voice he scarcely recognized. Emerge and be recognized.
The thing in the grasses bellowed, long and loud in an ugly vibrato, wild and unreadable. The lions answered nearby, long purring growls, closer now than they’d been earlier, and Ash’s pulse quickened. He felt in himself again the same wild urge to return their calls.
A high-pitched scream erupted from one of the trees back near the compound, and Ash opened his eyes again, straining to see the magnificent black eagle whose voice he recognized. Bateleur. The collector of souls who flew the living to the land of the dead. This time, though, Ash heard the eagle’s cry with fresh ears and knew the message for what it truly was.
He fell to the packed earth and writhed, the dust of the veldt coating his skin like fur. He struggled to his knees, feeling claws where his fingers should be, thin and spiked like thorns. Ash welcomed the sensation, recognizing the truth it carried. He dug his new claws into the cool dirt and raised his head.
Wherever Ash looked, he saw a world to be conquered.
He saw savannas that were his to roam, stands of grass he was sure felt finer than the softest linen, and everywhere, in every direction, he heard the sounds of the veldt’s night: the chirring of insects, the soft exhalations of a herd of wildebeest to the southwest, the soft cooing of the pink-brown African doves high in the tallest branches of the Panga Panga trees. He heard it all, felt it in his very marrow and knew here, at least, he could be king.
The next instant, gunfire shattered the darkness.
A figure ran at him, rifle pointed at the sky. Ash heard a shout of anger, a shout that could only be human, nothing else; then the figure in the twilight was Roy, sprinting across the grasslands, gun across his chest. Ash held his breath, not trusting the evidence of his eyes.
Panting, Roy reached Ash’s side. He crouched and dropped a hand on Ash’s bare shoulder.
The mystic quality of the dark plains vanished in an instant, and Ash fell heavily back into his body.
“Get up, Ash. Get up right now. We have to get back inside, fast.” Roy scowled at the veldt as if daring it to come close. “Ash! Get up! Now!” Roy hauled him roughly to his feet.
Ash staggered, confused and sick with adrenaline. “Roy,” he whispered. “I can explain.”
Roy glared, eyes burning with fierce determination. One of his fingers was digging into a whip mark on the back of Ash’s shoulder. Roy’s other hand still held the gun, and as another bellow erupted from the stand of grass, he spun lightly on his feet, cocking the weapon against his hip. “Come on! We have to go back!”
“It’s all right,” Ash began, then stopped. Because it wasn’t, not really, and for him to insist otherwise would be to insult Roy’s intelligence and, worse yet, his hard-won experience of surviving this wild land.
Roy’s grip tightened painfully on Ash’s shoulder. The gun was braced against Roy’s hip, and he swung it in wide arcs even as he began pushing Ash back in the direction of the compound.
Ash watched the vast expanse of veldt recede from his view and, despite the warmth of Roy at his back, he felt an inexplicable pang, as if waking from a strange and wonderful dream. Once they were both safely behind the thornbush gate, however, Ash’s awakening was abrupt.
“What the hell were you thinking going out there?” Roy stored the rifle on a rack just outside the door of the hut, then stalked inside.
“It wasn’t like that.”
Roy lit the lantern against the gloom inside the hut. Its light cast angry shadows across his handsome features. “Oh yeah? What was it like, then?”
Ash’s cheeks burned. “I wanted to protect you.”
“Protect me? From what? The great big lion standing next to you? You got a funny way of protecting people, kid.”
“What lion? No. No! Look, Roy, they weren’t next to me; they were off somewhere, at least a couple hundred yards.” I was fine, Ash heard himself keep saying. I was fine. Out on the veldt. In the dark. Completely unprotected and surrounded by lions. I was fine.
“You’re telling me now you didn’t see the lion standing over you? That’s great, Ash. Real great. Sure, you were fine. You were aces.”
“There was no lion. I heard them, several of them, but they were too far away.”
“Don’t tell me what I saw!”
Ash closed his eyes. It was all going wrong. He’d failed in Leicestershire, failed at Thornside, and now even failed at reality.
“You’ve been here, what, a week? Maybe two at the outside? You have no idea. You don’t know what’s out there. But I do, and let me tell you, you keep acting this way, you’ll get yourself killed.” Roy stopped, breathing hard, then turned to adjust the lantern’s wick. Shadows scudded around the room.
Without a word, Ash turned and went outside, leaving Roy for the welcome darkness of the open night sky.
His cheeks still burned as he took in Roy’s admonitions. For a moment, he saw himself in Roy’s eyes: a foolish young man in a dangerous foreign land, a child in need of rescue. Drawing a deep breath, Ash leaned his head back against the adobe wall of the hut and stared up into the star-washed sky. Everything Ash knew of Rhodesia and the veldt—of its lethal predators and the unseen scavengers of the night—everything added up to one big misstep.
Even though Ash still couldn’t make sense of Roy’s words—none of the lions had come remotely near him—he realized he’d made a huge mistake. He’d been such a fool!
He’d stood out on the veldt at dusk, alone and unprotected, thinking he could talk to the lions. It was madness.
Except… Ash returned to those wild and stolen moments when something had stirred in him. Something so deeply buried Ash might never have found it until he’d heard the lions call.
“Hey.”
Ash hadn’t heard Roy’s approach. Swallowing hard, he tried to will a response to his lips.
“Look,” Roy continued, “I might’ve been a little harsh on you back there. I apologize.”
Ash nodded. His voice had still not returned.
“Thing is, you have to understand I’ve seen things. Both during the…the war and out here, I’ve seen things. It’s real easy to come out here and get caught up in all the space, you know? All the space and the animals and the—”
“The wildness,” Ash finished for him. “It’s easy to get caught up in the wildness of the place and forget that wild things can kill you. It’s their nature. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yeah. That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s hard to remember when you’re looking at so much beauty—the veldt and the savanna, the way it endures, just laughing at all the men who come here thinking they can tame it, thinking they know better than Africa. There’s nothing we know that the veldt hasn’t taught a hundred men or more the hard way.”
“Thank you,” Ash said quietly. “You’ve rescued me twice now. I am completely in your debt.”
“That’s not what I was getting at.”
“No, it wasn’t. You’re too good a man for that. But still the fact remains.” Ash clapped a hand on Roy’s shoulder. “I’m grateful. And I’ll try to do better.” He hesitated. “Roy, was there really a lion standing over me?”
Roy shrugged. “I saw it before I saw you, crouching. When I fired my gun, it disappeared. They’re damn quick. I guess it must have been behind you.”
Ash nodded slowly, thinking back to that moment on the veldt. He knew, deep down inside, no lion had been near him. “Behind me. That must be it. I’m sorry.”
The moment stretched between them.
It would be so easy to give in, Ash thought. He still felt the wilderness stirring in him, untamed and longing
for release. He’d been so close out on the veldt, hearing the lions near at hand, hearing them call to him. There was something in him that longed to answer, and he was sure now it was the same part of him that wanted Roy. Wanted him so badly.
Ash remembered that first night back at Thornside—the warm, fragrant air on his skin like a caress, the tang of Roy’s musk, the heat of his full cock. The thrill of the forbidden.
But so many things were happening now, all at once, that Ash knew he should be afraid or overwhelmed; he’d never been very good at keeping his head. But he knew with crystalline clarity that what had been freed in him by the lion’s cry had always been there, waiting, and with equal certainty Ash knew Roy was just as responsible for loosing it as anything on the veldt. If anything, Roy was the wildest thing out here.
Ash stared into Roy’s eyes. For a moment, the night moved again, and a very clear image formed in Ash’s mind: he saw Roy and himself, naked and joined in a downpour. Roy lay on his back in the mud and grit, a torrential rain wetting his skin; Ash sat astride him, riding his hard cock, face turned up to the thunderclouds, roaring out his pleasure, his need, the rightness of their connection. Green lightning roiled across ironstone tors, and Ash was unbowed, feeling Roy swell in him, watching, pleased as Roy arched, eyes squeezed shut, rainwater like tears, like sweat on his skin, fingers digging into the skin of Ash’s hips, allowing him no quarter. In the vision, Ash’s cries of pleasure resounded off the boulders and joined with the noise of the storm, trumped only by the beating of a pair of great, black wings.
The vision was so real, Ash nearly stumbled; only Roy’s gaze held him upright. Dizzy and confused, Ash brushed past Roy and ducked under the leather door of the hut. He needed time to think, to reconcile his thoughts with his emotions. Panting, he gripped his head in both hands, eyes squeezed shut. What in heaven was happening to him?
“When I couldn’t find you, I didn’t know what had happened.” Roy had followed so quietly Ash hadn’t heard him. “I thought you were lost or hurt. I don’t know, dead out there somewhere.” Roy stepped closer, so close Ash could smell the tang of his sweat. “Don’t run away again. You don’t have to be afraid.”