That opening, narrow and sinuous, made any precise aim impossible; a bullet or an arrow would almost certainly have ricocheted. Even so, Louise counted four men that she or Dirk—but no one else—could certainly have shot.
A tremor in the grass caused her to turn round; something, man or beast, was moving there. Louise de Gavres cocked her revolver. A slight hum that was only perceptible, even to animals with the keenest hearing, at a range of a few paces, and a branch raised up twice, signaled the presence of Rak. In a trice he was beside the Grafina,
Meanwhile, Louise took aim, one after another, at the four Carabao-Men accessible to bullets, to assure herself that she could shoot them down.
“It’s a bad thing to spare them!” said Rak. “Aren’t they pitiless?”
“They haven’t attacked us, Rak.”
“They’re attacking us by following us!” replied the primitive, full of disdain for such vain scruples. “Oh, if I could shoot like the mistress…!”
“Why are they following us?” she murmured.
Rak’s shoulders shook. “For the mistress…for the young woman who has crossed the ocean…or both,” he replied, anxiously. “The Carabao-Men have always stolen women. Didn’t the Graf or the Graf’s father tell their descendants that?”
Rak looked at the young woman with a submissive ardor. He admitted that they were separated by an abysm, but he loved her crudely, as a man loves a woman above all those of her race. She did not deign to know that.
“Let’s get back to the camp!” she said.
All the fires were still burning strongly and the sentries were at their posts. With its circle of rocks, the majority overhanging, the camp ought to have been able to withstand the attack of a company much more numerous than the defenders. The only weak point, the western opening, had been fortified under the surveillance of Rak and put under the guard of two sentries with three dogs.
We’ve taken enough precautions to stand off 100 men, the Grafina thought. She smiled disdainfully. There would be no attack. Only trickery on the part of the Carabao-Men was to be feared. They were only a threat to the Grafina herself or Corisande—but the tent in which Corisande was sleeping was in the center of the camp. To reach it, it was first necessary to cross the cleared ground, avoiding the vigilance of the sentries, then cross the lines occupied by men and dogs—men almost as prompt to awake from sleep as the beasts.
The abduction of Corisande was thus impossible, and also that of the Grafina, with her infallible dogs, which an emanation as strange as that of the Carabao-Men would have woken up even before they had crossed the cleared zone. Even so, Louise de Gavres decided to watch while Rak slept.
Rak shook his head and considered the camp suspiciously. “The sentries aren’t all reliable, Mistress.”
“The dogs are. But I intend to watch myself while you sleep.”
“Rak isn’t tired.”
“Rak hasn’t slept for half a night since we set out. I want him to have all his strength for tomorrow. Do you trust me?”
“More than all these sentries put together!”
“Then rest as best you can when you’re not fearful of any surprise.”
“I shall be dead until the Mistress wakes me up!”
The Grafina made a second tour of the camp. The white silhouette doubled the vigilance of the men. She encouraged them with a brief word, and all of them, while they accepted her leadership, were subject to the seduction of her person.
There was none who did not desire her, weakly or energetically; in their savage souls, fable scarcely surpassed the illusion of primitive desire. According to their natures, though, the desire was servile or bold, precise or confused; the most ardent were no less pliable to the will of the woman, with whose indomitable character they were familiar, and whose audacity, skill and agility they respected.
As she terminated the inspection, she saw Frédéric in front of her, and looked at him without benevolence. “Be careful not to cross the boundary of the camp!” she said, rudely.
“There’s danger, then?” The lusterless face and immense eyes fascinated him, although he still had a hostile ferment within him, which seemed to be increasing without any reason.
“In the wilderness, one must always believe that there’s danger.”
“I sense that you’re afraid of a particular danger…”
She raised a shoulder impatiently and, ceasing to shield him, said: “We’re being followed by Carabao-Men. Not numerous enough for us to fear their attack—that would be easily repelled—but they might set a trap for us, if the circumstances favor an abduction.”
“An abduction?”
“Yes, the Carabao-Men abduct women—and even men. They sacrifice the men to their gods, if one can give that name to the elements they worship. They let the females live—whose fate is abominable.”
Frédéric studied the fires, which were projecting a bright light over the cleared zone, the sentries on watch and the dogs, which were drowsy but whose senses remained alert to the surroundings. “A surprise seems impossible,” he murmured.
“Humanly, yes…it seems to me…”
“Outside of humans, what is there to fear?”
The large eyes enveloped Frédéric with a disdainful expression. “Outside of humans, there is nature: nature is always the stronger…even in your lands where humans imagine that they have tamed everything. Was there not an earthquake in Messina that killed 100,000 of those conquerors in ten minutes?27 And I remember a cyclone which, passing over one of your cities, killed the schoolchildren playing in a courtyard surrounded by railings. Five minutes before, everything had been resting in a profound peace; the storm passed by, and those poor children were no more than a memory.”
She uttered a silvery laugh, which he found charming in spite of himself.
“Who knows whether an aerolith, in the abysms of the sky, might not be on its way to crush us? But then, everything is calm, the precautions are taken; there would be no point in being anxious. Rest, man from Europe!”
Two hours before daybreak, clouds covered the stars; a wind rose that whirled through the camp. Louise was still on watch; Rak soon came to relieve her. She breathed in the wind and found a stormy odor therein. In the distance, above the eastern rocks, one constellation was still apparent. The clouds swallowed it up.
Rain and tempest! thought Louise.
The horses were beginning to wake up; their muscular heads could be seen stirring, and their large violet-tinted eyes shining in the firelight. Dogs were sniffing the feverish emanations of the weather. The sentries waited, impassively.
The advance-guard of the tempest got under way. The winds, ceasing to swirl, arrived in immense waves of vast extent, which had galloped over the ocean and were now mounting an assault on the forests, savannahs and mountains. The clouds lit up; having come from the occidental abyss, lightning-bolts were flashing all the way to the Eastern horizon.
The meteorological phenomena were alive, palpitating like racing hearts, with a power superior to that of all the carnivores and herbivores on the planet; the thunder growled like 100,000 lions, and deluges of water streamed from the sponges of the clouds.
The camp-fires writhed then; thick smoke was choking the men and filling the animals with terror. Dizzy horses bounded around the circle of granite. Then, in the immense stream, everything was extinguished; the wind and the rain held sway over an ocean of darkness. And in the boundless night, in which the herds of the tempest collides frantically with the hordes of the water, a sudden sense of impotence and resignation paralyzed the men and the animals.
Before the rain, Rak had appeared in front of the Grafina, as impassive as if he had been death itself, and said: “It’s the Ancestral Gods. Rak wants to watch over the Mistress…”
“No! Let Rak watch over the foreign guests. Their lives must come before mine.”
“All would be lost if the Mistress were lost!”
“Why lost? The tempest will pass…”
&n
bsp; “If the Ancestral Gods wish it! It might squash us like flies, but if we survive and the Mistress has disappeared, the Carabao-Men will steal the foreign woman and eat the foreign man.” He lowered his head and murmured, fatalistically: “The fires will soon go out. It will be as black as the tomb…”
Louise de Gavres adopted a commanding tone: “Watch over the foreigners’ tents!”
He bowed and, without adding a word, headed toward the French couple’s tents.
Before the rain extinguished the fires, the Grafina covered herself with a leather mantle and lit a little horn lantern—but a whirlwind carried the tent away and the feeble light flickered and went out.
Momentarily enveloped by the canvas and partly knocked over, the young woman found herself devoid of shelter in a flood almost as dense as the waves of a torrent. Everything around her was invisible. The howling of the storm did not permit any human or animal noise to be heard. In spite of everything, Louise’s violent soul loved the brutal victory of the elements and the power of the universe; she was intoxicated by the taste for risk and peril that she had inherited from her ancestors.
Nevertheless she was anxious about the fate of her guests; in the chaos that abolished all responsibility, she felt responsible all the same. Groping along, she attempted to rejoin them. She had nothing to guide her. In that unlimited darkness and those torrents of water, any attempt at orientation was vain to the point of being derisory. Debris interrupted her progress—one hundred objects carried away by the tempest. Like her own tent, the foreigners’ tent had surely been uprooted…
She moved forward regardless, or moved, at least, sometimes in one direction and sometimes in another.
Abruptly, she felt herself seized.
Two arms had closed around her—two arms that seemed very long and whose strength was evidently enormous—but the Grafina’s slender muscles were packed with strength and the formidable tension of the muscles of a big cat. She made a rapid about-turn, her fists landing forcefully on an invisible face. The grip relaxed.
Louise de Gavres leapt backwards and found herself with a kris in her right hand and a revolver in her left.
She was not in any doubt: the marshy and musky odor that the wind had initially carried away from her had been revealed during the attack: the Carabao-Men had invaded the camp.
Cries of distress, rage and agony, followed by a sharp scream and a female call for help, confirmed the disaster.
All her senses taut, the Grafina attempted to grasp some indication—but the odor had disappeared; the enormous deluge, combined with the wind and the darkness, rendered any action vain.
They’ve abducted the young woman, and perhaps killed her brother! Louise said to herself, filled by an anguish that she would never have felt on her own behalf.
She had a religious sense of hospitality, so profound that the idea of not having been able to help her guests plunged her into a wild despair. What could she do about it, though? Nature had intervened, and Nature was the stronger. Not stronger, however, than the Carabao-Men, since they had invaded the bivouac, killed one or more men and abducted Corisande!
The idea that she was powerless against them filled the Grafina with a fury that made her spine quiver; then the anguish returned, mingled with an inexpressible shame…
She ran at random, bumping into obstacles and slipping in the mud—but that frenzy soon stopped; nothing was more contrary to the mentality of the young woman than futile movement. It was necessary to wait.
She waited—and the wait seemed, in accordance with the rule, immeasurably long.
The rain ceased almost instantaneously; a hole was hollowed out in the clouds, allowing the first star to appear.
Weak glimmers of light filtered through the darkness. Rak appeared, holding a bamboo lantern in his hand. Somber, humiliated by his vanquished sense of smell and his deceived vigilance, he struck his breast scornfully and murmured: “Rak is a blind infant! But the Carabao-Men are the sons of the Water; they can plunge themselves in it for as long as pythons.”
“Rak is not at fault!” said Louise de Gavres, softly.
No other words could have moved the man so profoundly. He bowed, moaning: “Rak would give his life to get the foreign woman back…”
“I know that; everything that a man can do to pick up a trail, Rak will do…and no one is more skillful than he is.”
She lit her lantern again, and the track-beater’s lantern; other small glimmers of light joined her own. Savage faces surged forth, still upset by the disaster, and the Grafina made a tour of the camp in silence.
Animals and humans formed a chaotic mass there; the tempest had ravaged the carts. Two men were dead, found face down on the ground with jade daggers planted in their backs; another was dying in agony. As Louise had expected, Corisande was not found, nor Frédéric.
“They’ve abducted him too!” cried Hendrik, who was following the Grafina. “I thought they killed the men.”
“They always end up killing them,” Louise replied, “but sometimes they take them for sacrifice.”
While giving orders, she searched for a trail with Rak and the most skillful of the sentries. The inundated soil did not retain any trace capable of guiding a human eye or a canine sense of smell and a pursuit at hazard, in the dense darkness, would have been a waste of effort. They had to wait until dawn.
Even so, the Jufvrouw thought it useful to explore the Carabao-Men’s encampment. Rak was ready as soon as she said the word.
“There’s no hope of finding them there, though?” murmured Hendrik.
Louise shrugged her shoulders. “There’s little enough hope of finding some vague clue. If we only consider their intelligence, by our standards, the Carabao-Men are probably as stupid as the most stupid natives, but for their noses and cunning, they give nothing away to any race.” Through clenched teeth, she added: “Tonight, they’re the victors—they’ve inflicted the worst possible shame upon us by carrying off our guests. I shall not rest until I’ve recovered them or avenged them. I’ll go with Rak and three other men. You’ll be responsible for the caravan…and you’ll go to meet your father.”
“I’d rather go with you. The kidnappers…”
“What good would that do? It’s necessary to know one’s strength and one’s skills. You left this country a long time ago. It gives me no pleasure to tell you so, but in the pursuit you’d be nothing but a burden. You’d slow us down. In entrusting the caravan to you, I’ll give you trustworthy aides. Besides, now that they have their captives, the Carabao-Men won’t come back again. If Dirk wants to come after us himself, that will be the most powerful of reinforcements.”
“There’s no doubt that he’ll want to!”
“Dirk is the finest rifleman in the islands, with a nose as good as Rak’s and the strength of a tiger!” said the Grafina, enthusiastically—for there was no man she admired more.
“He says that your rifle is as good as his!”
“But will he be able to catch us up? He’ll need to pick up the trail here. Tell him that I’ll leave the sign of the Trefoil as I go…here’s Rak!”
Rak was panting, having come back to the camp at a run. “The Carabao-Men have gone along the river, Mistress. They’ve built a raft—the bank still bears the traces. Rak doesn’t think it’s a trick, since that route is the quickest—the only quick one, when it’s necessary to transport prisoners or loot.”
“Dangerous for them if they stick to it! We’ll risk nothing by following it right away—any other would be impossible before daybreak. Saddle the horses!”
A quarter of an hour later, Louise de Gavres was galloping along the river, followed by Rak and three other horsemen. A few stars had reappeared and, low in the East, a pale light was diffusing through the clouds.
VII. Into the Unknown
The Carabao-Men were carrying away Corisande and Frédéric, who had been captured in the same elementary fashion—seized by exceedingly long arms, whose grip was as powerful as that of a
python. Corisande had scarcely been able to struggle, overwhelmed by crushing force. Frédéric, agile and robust, had resisted for more than a minute, but the grip that enveloped his arms and torso had tightened further, taken away his breath and paralyzed him.
They were carried off into the howling night, whose darkness seemed to be made of tempest and rain. Their horror participated in the frenzy of the weather; it was as if they had been captured by men and the elements at the same time. They had cried out and they had protested, but their voices were lost in the immense wind.
It seemed that Nature itself had gripped them—the Nature that had dominated their ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years; civilization seemed like a fugitive minute in eternity.
Their anguish was increased by the stink of their captors. All terrible things weighed upon their souls: degradation, torture and death. Humiliated by being in the power of brutes, impotent to help Corisande, Frédéric was convulsive with fury.
The kidnappers were advancing slowly through the deluge, over the muddy ground. They finally stopped, without anything visible revealing the surroundings; a noise fused with other sounds that advertised the proximity of the river; the prisoners found themselves under shelter, presumably in a hollow in the cliffs or a cave.
“Corisande!” the young man called. In this refuge, the racket of the elements was attenuated.
“They’ve taken you too!” replied a weak voice.
Raucous cries interrupted them; the Carabao-Men began talking, all at once. A rough hand fell upon the young man’s mouth, and then he felt himself being tied up. The storm was beginning to abate, however; the rain was slackening. Frédéric and Corisande were lifted off the ground, carried to the river and deposited on a vacillating surface that must have been a raft—and which soon moved away in the darkness, pitching continually.
The Givreuse Enigma Page 19