THE LAST SAVANNA

by Mike Bond

  When Warwar came back he’d take her to the geb tree. Before Klaus, Petr had made her Hungarian meals on a hotplate in his narrow little hamber de bonne up six flights of stairs in the cinquième, looking out on the Arena of Lutecia. But all the things she’d done happily with Petr she’d paid for afterwards with Klaus.

  The sun lay on her cheek like a pan of coals, burned into her teeth, made them so hot they seared her gums. Her arteries had emptied; she could hear the distant thump of her heart echoing along their desiccated corridors.

  THE DUSK BREEZE brought the smell of dung smoke down the valley. MacAdam and M’kele turned from the Boranis’ trail uphill among angular boulders where mambas and cobras had come out to enjoy the lingering heat, and whoever went first had to wave his arm as he walked among the boulders to warn the snakes and avoid being struck in the face. When they had climbed halfway to the ridge they shifted west again towards the smoke smell, till the Borani village and its backdrop of cliffs appeared round the shoulder of the slope.

  Figures moved back and forth before a tiny fire; the shrill of children’s voices echoed up the cliffs. But there were few camels in the thorn paddock; most of the huts had no fires. “Out raiding,” M’kele said.

  “Or letting the camels range.”

  “Then where’s all the men?”

  “They wouldn’t keep her, if they went raiding.”

  “Some took her and the rest chase them.”

  Again it was like a traffic accident of a loved one, where he was running towards the mangled wreck knowing she was dead inside, telling himself this clearly so there could be no mistaken hope. “Maybe she’s still in the huts…”

  “I’ll go down,” M’kele said, “and have a look.”

  MacAdam wanted him to, felt horribly ashamed. “That’s for me,” he said.

  “Those ribs slow you. You speak no Borani—”

  “We’re not here to talk to them.” MacAdam searched the cliff walls for a way to circle the Borani camp and come down behind it. “If you move forward, after darkness, to the front, and get down low in the rocks, I’ll go around and down into the camp. I’ll have to go hut to hut.”

  “They’ll catch you.”

  “If I get in trouble I’ll shoot or yell. Then you fire from the front, divert them, so I can pull back.”

  “There’ll be no pulling back on that cliff—”

  MacAdam felt fear for M’kele, realized he was transferring his own danger to his friend. “If I don’t come back, leave before dawn. Don’t try to find me.”

  THE SUN HAD SET when Warwar returned from the water hole to camp. If Ibrahim and Rashid were going to kill him, now would be an easy time. He held the three gourds of water before his chest like a shield, his rifle slung loosely over his shoulder in such a way that he could grab it instantly.

  Ibrahim, on guard above camp, came down smiling and took a gourd, pulled out the wooden cork and began drinking. “Wait!” Warwar whispered, voice dry with heat.

  Ibrahim lowered the gourd, sucked phlegm from his sinuses and spat. “You’ve had plenty!”

  “The hole was dry—and I had to dig—this’s all there was. Look how you waste it!” Warwar tugged the gourd but Ibrahim would not let go. Warwar ran down to the whitewoman who lay motionless on her side, the goatskin half over her face. He tipped a drop of water on to his finger and touched her rough hot lips. He slipped a wet fingertip between her lips, to her tongue; she moaned and turned face down into the sand. “Water,” he whispered in his hoarse, sundried voice. She looked up, seeming shocked, ashamed, or perhaps that was just the ugliness of her sunburnt face. “Water,” he repeated, with his finger teasing a drop of it against her lips, feeling them soften. “I brought you water.”

  She lay on her back as he held her head sideways and let the water trickle into her mouth. When the gourd was half-empty he pulled it away, her head following it, hands grasping. “Soon,” he said.

  Rocks tumbled down behind them; he forced himself to relax; Rashid came and reached out his hand.

  “This is for the prisoner,” Warwar said. “Yours is with Ibrahim.”

  “He said you have mine, that his was nearly empty.”

  “He drank it all!” Warwar protested.

  “You drank it, coming back.” Rashid snatched up the full bottle Warwar had laid on the sand, pulled the cork out with his teeth and sucked the water down, trickles glistening in his beard.

  “Why do you do this?” Warwar whispered. “She’ll die—you’ll have no money!”

  “My money’s not earned like this—sucking a whitewoman’s teats.”

  “Then leave me with her, and the money will be mine.”

  “Yours? This you could never do alone—write the words for them to send money! You can’t keep her—already you sniff between her legs. Soon you’ll be her captive.”

  Warwar turned back to the woman, who was watching them with uncomprehending blue eyes. “It was not I, but you, who could not keep her,” he said.

  Rashid tossed down the empty gourd. “This water’s foul—you should’ve crushed in some mawa seeds, to clean it.”

  Warwar lifted the remaining half-gourd to the woman’s lips. “You’ll feel stronger soon,” he said in Swahili. “I’ll bring you more.”

  She felt the water seep into her coagulated cells. Her head throbbed; her stomach trembled; her throat ached. She opened her eyes to the desert sunset, saw Warwar, Rashid; all seemed new, or had she never seen what was always there? “You should let me go,” she said.

  Warwar corked the empty gourd. “You’d die here, without me.”

  “Bring me to a road, and leave me. That way you can go home. No one’ll find you.”

  “I’m sorry, but you’re money to us.”

  “Yet you’re letting me die.”

  “Tomorrow we’ll go to the spring, where this water came from. You won’t die. Unless you try to escape.”

  She drew her knees up and rolled onto them, raised herself on all fours, lifted her head, sat back on her ankles. The desert was suffused with a topaz luster sharpening each rock, tinting the lavender clouds above the savage tattered peaks, each glistening bead of sand. The corona of a fallen sun spread across the jagged western horizon, and into her body and soul flowed a sense of forgiving peace, surpassing comprehension. Suddenly she saw and knew these three poor men in their ragged robes and hungry deeds, how they had been bypassed by time and were trying to catch up, but could never apprehend that which no longer existed, that which for them had never been, or had passed them by in a dimension beyond their touch or ken, that they, as much as she, were outcasts of time. She felt pity and love, placed her hand on the boy killer’s, furtive as a mouse under the sleeve of his cloak. “Don’t worry—we’re all the same.”

  She felt a moment’s contact, a sense of what there’d been with the Hungarian boy in the hamber de bonne—of so many things ignored and not understood.

  Warwar pulled back his hand.

  “Tell the others,” she said, “you mustn’t fight over me. Tomorrow I’ll be stronger and we can go to the water. Then we’ll decide what to do.” Talking exhausted her, tore her throat; she curled into her niche of rocks and sand. “Please give me my goatskin. I’m going to sleep.”

  He spread the goatskin over her, her cheekbone awash with her strange yellow hair. Already she was asleep; he sat back on his heels and watched the stars one by one cut their way through onrushing darkness, till all was reversed, day was night, and the blackness glittered with all the desert’s sands, each a tiny flame beyond the bounds of time.

  There was a click of stones as Rashid led a camel uphill to tether it for the night. Warwar smelt this was the lactating female, could smell Rashid’s sweet skin and the sour oil odor of his rifle, could smell the change in the rocks as the sun’s heat left them, how the sand contracted and grew damp, noted the tang of the commiphora scrub from the far slope. As the wind no longer descended from the peaks but had shifted and was now from the west; he coul
d sense the faint dampness of the little great lake, Chewbahir, four days’ walk away, making him think of the woman and what she had said.

  He stood, feeling a strange pain in his knees, picked up his rifle and climbed the slope after Rashid. A white shape blocked him. “Good evening, cousin,” he said.

  “You leave the prisoner?” Ibrahim answered.

  “She can barely move.”

  “You want to lose her again?”

  “Last time, cousin, it was not I, but Rashid—”

  “Your memory wanders. Because we couldn’t trust you to watch her we made you go for water—despite your fears of the Gabbra…”

  In a breath Warwar knew he was being drawn back into the old hostility, the old arguments, despite what the woman had suggested. But he could not disagree with Ibrahim, although Ibrahim lied, because this was how Ibrahim wanted things to be. He could meekly agree, but Ibrahim would see through that, too, see he had given up hope of concord and was planning treachery. He could argue, fight Ibrahim’s lies, but that would only lead to deeper hatred. ‘It has been a long journey, cousin,” he said. “Please forgive me if I’ve angered or disappointed you—”

  “I don’t care enough to be disappointed.”

  And Warwar saw that Ibrahim wanted this hatred, that he feared nothing more than trust and kindness between them, because it did not fit his needs. “Please forgive me, nonetheless. I will do as you say.”

  “Go back to your whitewoman.” Ibrahim’s voice softened. “Keep our bounty safe from hyenas.”

  Warwar went down to the woman and sat, rifle across his knees. Ibrahim will accept me as long as I’m a foolish child, he thought, when I do as he says and do not interfere. Like that I’m never a danger for him with Soraya. That way I will accept the fistful of coins he gives me when the woman is ransomed, and will never have cattle and goats to pay Soraya’s bride price. Like that Ibrahim and Rashid will have much money. Although Rashid swears he cares not for money taken in ransom, did he not empty the pockets of the men I shot at the Land Rovers?

  The woman shifted in her sleep, crying out briefly in her guttural tongue—a name, perhaps? Warwar tried to imagine a man covering her but could not, told himself that even the hyena loves its own kind. Even the whites—so mechanical, leaden, ruled by their strange, solitary dreams, with their rigid faces and tense eyes, they who always seem in pain or worry, who so rarely laugh or sing or dance or let the earth’s heart beat freely inside them—can they too love? Not like us, surely, but at all?

  Was he the woman’s man, the tall, cowardly one we sent back after the attack? How could she love one like that? Perhaps he was rich, had paid a high bride price. Now he’s gone back to his other wives, forgotten this one. How much money will he give? Perhaps he’d rather buy a new young wife, be pleased this one’s gone. Like most whitemen he was so feeble and pale—did he even reach Kenya at all?

  No matter, the whitewoman can write the words to bring the money. In the afterwards either I will or will not have Soraya’s bride price. Would she truly rather have Ibrahim than me? What will happen with Soraya is hidden in time: already the stars know but will not say.

  27

  APPROACHING the Borani camp, MacAdam forced himself to slow down, to go silently, wanting to rush in and find what they’d done to her, telling himself there’d either be little left or she’d be already gone, under the sand. That they’d just kill him too.

  But it was better not to think of that, better not to think at all, he told himself again. He must choose carefully each rock to step round or on, must keep to the shadows and watch for sentries and take care that his boots didn’t rattle gravel or dislodge a stone, careful that his shirt didn’t drag on an edge of rock or twang a thorn, that the wind stayed in his face and didn’t warn their dogs, till their huts loomed life-sized below him in the cambric of the night and he could almost touch their roofs from the altar of the cliff, their smells of dung embers and oily bodies rising to him, the malevolent odor of their goats and the astringency of their camels’ urine against the desert hardpan. But still nowhere could he sense her.

  After many hours, when the voices ceased to percolate up from the huts and firesides, when the dogs had quieted and the camels had all knelt to earth and dropped down on their bellies, chewing their harsh cud of thorns and twigs, when the last child had cried out in her sleep and even the embers of the fires had closed their red eyes, he slunk down into the camp and stepped silently from door to door. But he found no sign of her. Wanting to walk out into the middle of the village, between the huts and down the valley, but knowing he’d be seen by a sentry and that this would cost M’kele’s life, he instead retook his path up the cliff, round and down to M’kele, who climbed up to meet him.

  “Maybe they take her somewhere else.”

  “You know that’s not true, M’kele. You mustn’t say it.”

  “Tomorrow we catch one, discuss it with him.”

  “Later.” With the loss of hope MacAdam found a great exhaustion. He tried to remember when he had last slept and could not. Had it been four nights, or only three? Were his broken ribs hurting more or did the exhaustion only make them so?

  And where, he wondered, does pain go, out in this universe of stars and space—what happens to the sorrow and the joy? If it’s vanished was it ever there? “Why don’t we sleep, somewhere up the mountain?” MacAdam said. “Tomorrow we’ll track down the Somalis and kill them.”

  “Then we’ll have to be careful, going back. We’re deep inside Ethiopia.”

  One’s never deep inside anywhere, thought MacAdam. Can’t M’kele see this? We live on illusions, and call the real false. Only killing’s not false; only killing changes things. Only killing heals. I was right not to kill the Somalis in the Matthews Range, but these will die for killing her.

  They climbed the mountain to the ridge where the Somalis and their two camels had camped the night after they had escaped the Boranis. In the first rays of dawn the two camels’ tracks showed they were hasty and burdened, their hooves leaving white gashes on the black stone, their strides wide and poorly placed among the rocks; then came the disordered tumult of the Boranis’ hooves, of many camels running, then a cartridge glowing in the early sun. “They’ve changed their minds, the Borani,” M’kele said. “We’re going to find the Somalis dead.”

  “Then we’ll go back. Once we’ve found her body.”

  There was a place where seven AK47 cartridges lay like a broken necklace on the sand, where the young Somali killer’s tracks wound like a lizard’s among the stones, then finally vanished. No matter what they tried they could not find them, nor now those of the two Somalis still on camels. Holding his bush hat over his brow to block the sun, MacAdam stared down at the precise and meaningless contour intervals of M’kele’s map. He felt the fire in his throat that precedes dying. Despite the agony in his chest he forced himself to stand, breathe deeply. M’kele must not die. “We should go to the water, marked on the map—Dibandiba.”

  M’kele forced dried lips apart with his teeth. “It says there’s water, sometimes.”

  WITH THE WHITEWOMAN ALONE on Rashid’s camel the Somalis crossed over the baboon-backed mountain next morning and reached the water hole at noon. Warwar lowered himself down its shaft to the cool mud at the bottom, happy to see it had slightly refilled from his excavation the day before. He restacked the branches of quadi thorn he had used yesterday, took off his djellabah and doubled its bottom end over the branches, and pushed them down steadily, increasing his weight, moving his hands to avoid the finger-long thorns poking up through the wool.

  Ibrahim lowered the water gourds to Warwar on a rawhide cord; coming down the long darkening hole they blocked the light. Warwar untied them and put them alongside the djellabah whose fabric was dampening as he shoved it deeper and deeper into its sieve of thorns and branches. He licked his lips and the sound was like sand over stone, magnified in this hollow, cool pit fragrant with crushed quadi leaves.

 
After a long time of pushing down, a gray mud began to appear through the fabric of his djellabah, and Warwar knelt to sip it. It tasted like rotten metal, grainy and sour; it slipped down his throat like warm honey and he could not stop sucking it, his face pushing into the wool. A horrible pain struck his spine and he leaped up screaming, knocking the gourds. “Young scum!” Ibrahim thundered down the pit. “Drink when your elders thirst? When the bounty woman will die?”

  The fist-sized rock Ibrahim had hurled down on him lay in the center of his djellabah, dampened on one edge. Wet ran down his thigh; he had a sudden fear it was urine, rubbed it with his finger and tasted blood. Now Ibrahim will die: it was as precise a discovery as if he’d read it cut in stone. I must find a time and way to kill him, to make him crawl before he dies. But Ibrahim will know this and be waiting. Feeling naked without his gun, Warwar craned his neck to look up into the tiny glaring orifice half-blocked by Ibrahim’s head. “I give you my regrets, cousin. I was in such a hurry yesterday to return with the three bottles that I drank very little, thus had much thirst. I give you my regrets.”

  “That did not keep you yesterday from drinking most of mine!” Ibrahim’s voice was tubular, as if spoken from a jug. “Fill the gourds quickly—you’d keep us all day in the sun.”

  Ibrahim will change the truth, Warwar thought, and others will believe him. Already Rashid does. For this I’ll kill Rashid too. With all the ransom for the whitewoman I shall claim Soraya.

  A film of briny pallid liquid was collecting on his djellabah. He pushed Ibrahim’s rock into the center of the cloak, deeper and deeper; after a while the water began to edge up around it. When there was enough he forced the first gourd down into the djellabah; the water noise rose inside it almost to the neck.