“We should have brought Cassidy,” Martine grumbled as Mambo plodded tiredly along, giving an Oscar-worthy performance of a poor, abused pony who’d only ever known hardship and toil.
“It’s not the horse, it’s me,” Ben said charitably. “I don’t think I’m cut out to be a rider. Next time I’m bringing a bicycle.”
“You’re too nice,” Martine told him. “They know they can get away with murder with you, that’s the problem.”
“You’re an angel to them and it works for you,” Ben pointed out. “I think the difference is that you can communicate with them. They understand you. Even the leopard understands you. That’s why he came to your rescue.”
“He wasn’t rescuing me,” protested Martine. “He doesn’t even know me. He probably spotted Mr. Rat and thought he was looking at the largest rodent he’d ever seen and fancied a meal.”
Ben regarded her intently. “Are you sure? I mean, are you sure that Khan doesn’t know you?”
“I’m sorry,” said Martine, ashamed that she’d hidden it from her best friend. “I was waiting for the right time to tell you. Ben, he could have killed me, but he didn’t. He stood over me and I felt as though I looked into his soul. It was so magical and frightening I didn’t know how to put it into words.”
Ben smiled at her. “You don’t have to. I understood.”
“Ben?”
“Yes.”
“We have to save him.”
“We will. I promise.”
“Ben?”
He laughed. “Yes, Martine.”
“Thank you for staying with me when the hunters came after us. You could easily have got away. You’re a fantastic runner.”
“You would have done the same for me.”
She smiled at him. “Yes, I would.”
A strange expression crossed Ben’s face. “Martine?”
There was something in his voice that made her halt Sirocco. “Ben, what is it? You look as if you’ve remembered something scary.”
“It was Khan I saw that day, wasn’t it?” he said. “The day I fell down the waterfall, I mean. The drawing on the rocks was Sadie’s leopard, I just know it was. But who could have put it there—behind the curtain of water? I was nearly killed simply leaning over the edge to look at it. Do you think it was some kind of prediction? Do you think Grace was right and our destinies are connected in some way?”
“I’m not sure,” Martine answered, which wasn’t strictly true. Not only was she certain that she and Ben were connected, she was positive that he’d seen the sketch for a reason, because he was meant to see it. As to who put it there, well, it could have been done a century ago. She was saved from having to say anything else to Ben when Sirocco shied violently. If riding Jemmy hadn’t taught Martine to have lightning reaction times, she would have had a nasty fall. As it was, she ended up with her legs on either side of Sirocco’s ears and had to climb off the mare and remount.
The grass rustled and Ngwenya’s cousin and his shamwaris stepped onto the path. Griffin was still dressed like a gangster, in a trilby and waistcoat, although all were very grimy.
“So it’s true then?” he said. “The child who rides the white giraffe does have power over all the animals. Horses, birds, even leopards.” He laughed. “News travels quickly on the bush telegraph.”
“What do you want?” Ben demanded, moving Mambo as close to Sirocco as he could.
Griffin reached up and grabbed the bridles of both horses, and Martine caught a whiff of cologne. “I want your friend to help me with a little problem I have.”
Martine was livid. She knew that the tiniest pressure of her heel would send the Arab mare hurtling into the hills, leaving Griffin and his greedy, treasure-seeking buddies spitting dirt, but that would mean abandoning Ben and Mambo to their mercy and never in a million years would she do that.
“I know what you want,” she said scornfully. “You want to use me to control the leopard so that you can find him and kill him. You think that Khan will lead you to Lobengula’s treasure.”
Griffin smiled his wolfish smile. “So you’ve heard about our plans. Maybe you are correct; maybe you are not. I told you that if you assist us with the leopard, we might give you some gold or maybe a diamond.”
“I wouldn’t assist you if my life depended on it.”
“It might,” he said matter-of-factly.
16
An hour after Operation Wildcat had officially started, Martine was balanced on a crate in a boarded-up storeroom of what had once been a shop, peering through a vent at their captors. Two of them were asleep on the old shop counter, one wrapped in a tatty blanket, the other on an old mattress. Griffin had not been up long himself. He was out on the veranda, poking halfheartedly at the ashes of the previous night’s fire and clutching at his head as if he was trying to make sure it belonged to him.
Martine hoped that he had an extremely painful hangover or, better still, a migraine requiring a lobotomy. She was furious with him. She and Ben had been held captive by him and his fiendish friends for almost twenty-four hours, and every one of those hours had been misery. They’d been kidnapped at about nine o’clock in the morning and denied food or water until six in the evening because Martine refused to give Griffin any information on her gift.
“It is up to you if you want to starve yourself and your friend,” he said. “It is easy for you to talk.”
“We are not criminals,” one of his friends told her. “Don’t worry, we are not going to hurt you. We are only looking for treasure that is lying in the ground, wasted, when it is the right of any Ndebele man with initiative to enjoy its beautiful golden fruit if he locates it.”
In the end, she and Ben were so thirsty and hungry that Martine made up a story about how she had the power to read tea leaves if they were brewed with aloe juice and lucky beans. She explained that the liquid was very poisonous and could not be drunk, but that she would strain it away using a special method. Griffin immediately rushed off to gather all three items, and Martine pored over the mug and pretended to be shocked to read in the leaves that Mr. Ratcliffe was organizing a big hunt for the leopard that would leave Elephant Rock at five a.m. the next morning.
This information earned her and Ben as much water as they could drink and a dinner of sadza and tripe and other cow innards, which they couldn’t eat. The meat was so revolting that the smell alone made them nauseous, although they did force down a little sadza.
Martine had told Griffin about the hunt for a reason. She’d gambled that he would want to get to the leopard before Ratcliffe’s men did, and that she and Ben might still have a chance to escape and save Khan. It didn’t occur to her that the treasure seekers would be so eager to get to Khan first that she and Ben would be dragged up and down every hill in the Matopos until one o’clock in the morning in a bid to unearth him. By that time, Martine, who felt as if she hadn’t slept in weeks, was nearly sobbing with tiredness.
Since then, she and Ben had been locked in the dusty, windowless storeroom with nothing but a bottle of water, a wooden crate, and a couple of sacks. The sacks were Griffin’s idea of bedding. Outside in the ruined store, the treasure seekers had drunk Zambezi beer late into the night.
Martine had not slept a wink. One of the many things that had kept her awake was the frustrating fact that her survival kit was still tied to Sirocco’s saddle. She’d taken to hanging it there when she was riding, reasoning that she could impale herself on her Swiss Army knife if she fell off and landed on it. She hadn’t counted on Griffin and Co. showing up.
Now she was a wreck. Her hair was standing on end and she would have given anything for a shower. Squinting through the vent, she was pleased to see that Griffin looked even worse. Ben, on the other hand, was sitting cross-legged on the floor with his palms on his thighs and his eyes closed. He was the picture of tranquility.
“I don’t understand how you can sit there so peacefully when the Rat’s hunters are out searching for Khan,” Martine said
accusingly, climbing down from her unsteady perch. “He might be lying bleeding somewhere. Don’t you care what happens to him?”
Ben opened his eyes. “I think you already know the answer to that.”
He sprang gracefully to his feet and started to inspect every inch of their windowless cell—walls, floor, and ceiling.
“Now what are you doing?”
Ben didn’t reply. He put his nose close to a rusty water pipe and stared at it so hard, for so long, he went cross-eyed.
Martine became concerned that the stresses of the last week had taken more of a toll on him than she’d realized. “Ben, come and sit down,” she said. “I’m sorry about that comment about Khan. I know you care about him as much as I do.”
Ben continued to stare into the pipe. “Martine, what did Ngwenya tell us about the Enemy of Lions?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m serious. Can you remember what he said?”
She sighed. “Sure. He said, ‘Where you find these ants, you won’t find any lions. Even snakes, you won’t find them here.’ ”
He grinned. “That’s what I thought. Lie down on the floor. I have an idea.”
17
The walls of the old shop were a dirty beige, but Ben guessed that they’d once been painted with white limewash. He broke off a corner of the crate and used it to scrape off a teaspoonful of chalky powder, which he daubed carefully onto Martine’s face. Soon she was vampire white.
“The same color as Mr. Rat,” Ben teased, ducking away as she aimed a slap at his cheek.
After checking through the vent that Griffin’s companions were still asleep, he knocked and called “Help!” just loud enough to attract their leader’s attention.
“What do want?” Griffin growled through the door. “Do you think this is a hotel where you can order breakfast?”
“Griffin, this is an emergency,” Ben said. “Martine is ill.”
“I don’t believe you,” came the response. “It’s a trick so you can get away. Don’t worry; we’re not going to hurt you. We will let you go when we find the leopard.”
“Griffin, what if something happens to her? Do you really want that on your conscience?”
There was a long pause and then a key scraped in the lock and the rusty metal door screeched open a crack. Griffin peered suspiciously into the storeroom. His eyes were bloodshot and he smelled of beer. When he caught sight of Martine lying white and prone on the concrete, he was aghast.
“Heh!” he exclaimed, stepping into the room and locking the door behind him. “What has happened here? What is wrong with her?”
“She suffers from a serious medical condition called Tirrotinitus,” Ben said gravely. “If she is under stress, her blood sugar goes down and she falls unconscious. She urgently needs some form of liquid sugar, like a sweet fizzy drink or even just some sugar in water. If she has that, she will be fine. Otherwise . . .”
“Otherwise what will happen?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” Ben said. “But it’ll probably be bad.”
On cue, Martine writhed on the floor and made a choking noise.
“Mwali, don’t desert us now,” Griffin cried. He unlocked the door. “We have a bottle of cream soda but we have no fridge, so it is warm. Would that be okay?”
Ben gave him a winning smile. “Warm cream soda would be perfect.”
Half an hour later, he and Martine were cantering toward the granite mountain where Martine had first encountered Khan. A lead rope tied to her saddle forced Mambo to keep up with Sirocco.
Martine could not get over the genius of Ben’s escape plan, or his audacity in pulling it off. He’d not lost his cool for a second. “But what made you think of it?” she said, slowing the horses to give them a breather. “What made you think of the Enemy of Lions?”
“Easy,” he said. “An ant crawled over my foot when I was sitting on the floor and it made me think that if there were ordinary ants in our cell, there might also be the biting kind. I thought how brilliant it would be if the Enemies of Lions could be turned into the Enemies of Leopard Hunters.”
Martine giggled at the memory. “Boy, did they ever. And I loved the part where you told him I had Tirrotinitus. How do you dream up these things?”
After Griffin had brought the cream soda in a plastic cup, “Just in case you get any wrong ideas,” Ben had sent him away, explaining that Martine needed to be kept very quiet, but that he’d let him know how she was doing very shortly. He’d poured a trail of the fizzy drink from the water pipe to the door, then sprinkled the remainder over the sacks they’d slept on, leaving a corner of each dry.
Lured by the sugar, a thick black column of the ants was soon marching out through the pipe, down the wall, and along the floor to the threshold. The sacks became shimmering black rectangles of massed ant armies. Holding the dry corners, Ben pushed them carefully behind the wooden crate.
When he judged there were enough of them, he summoned Griffin again. Martine, who’d wiped the paint dust off her face and pinched her cheeks so she looked flushed, pretended to be revived and ready to at least discuss helping to find the leopard if it would mean he would let them go sooner. Her job was to keep Griffin standing on the threshold long enough for the Enemies of Lions to make their way up his pants leg.
Their plan came close to failing. Once Griffin was satisfied that Martine was again in possession of her powers, he wanted to leave right away. Martine had to fake a sudden relapse to keep him in the room. Ben used the distraction to flick the dregs of the cream soda onto Griffin’s shoe in the hope that it would encourage the ants to make the climb up his leg.
Seconds later, Griffin let out a tormented scream. He unlocked the storeroom door and went tearing out into the overcast morning. He was leaping, twisting, and screeching like a madman. His friends sat up, bleary-eyed. As soon as they saw the storeroom door open, the keys swinging in the lock, they came barreling toward it, but Martine and Ben were ready with the sacks. A single swish sent showers of biting ants all over the men. They ripped off their shirts, shouting and cursing, and went tearing into the bush after Griffin. None of them were in any condition to prevent their prisoners’ getaway.
Now Martine and Ben were racing to try to reach Khan, not knowing if the hunters had gotten there first. A pair of Black Eagles and a few vultures were circling the granite mountain where Martine had initially encountered him, and she feared the worst, but Ben insisted that birds of prey often hovered in the vicinity of hunts, knowing there might be easy pickings.
They were trotting again when Odilo suddenly came rushing out of the bush, his mournful face transformed by a smile. Sirocco shied again, but this time Martine was ready for her and barely lost her seat.
“Please, my friends, you must go to Black Eagle Lodge straightaway,” he said, reaching up to give them each an African handshake. “Straightaway. Ngwenya came to our village with your grandmother and Sadie not even one hour past. They are searching for you.”
“My grandmother and Sadie are at the retreat?” Martine cried. “That’s fantastic. Are they all right? Have the charges been dropped?”
“Yes,” said Odilo, “but they are very frightened because we had to tell them we had not seen you both since yesterday. Ngwenya is too much upset. He is very cross with himself for not accompanying you to the village. He is searching for you in the hills. Where have you been?”
As thrilled as she was to hear that her grandmother was at the retreat and unharmed, Martine was aware that every second was precious if she and Ben were to get to Khan in time. She gave a sketchy account of their night at the hands of Griffin and his friends, leaving out the part about the Enemies of Lions. The details would keep for another day.
Odilo’s expression resumed its customary mournfulness. “I’m sorry for this,” he said. “My son, even as a small boy he was very, very smart. For many years he dreamed of going to university to be a lawyer. But after school he met these tsotsis and they turned
his head with stories of the life he will have if he finds this treasure. Now all he can talk about is gold, gold, gold. I tell him, ‘Griffin, no good can come of this. It will end with you crying in jail.’”
He looked up at Martine. “I’m sorry for what he did to you, especially after you gave us the muti that made our daughter well again.”
Gunshots rang out in the distance. Sirocco danced skittishly and pawed at the ground. There was a knot of panic in Martine’s throat as she tried to control the Arab.
Ben urged Mambo up beside her. “We need to go,” he said.
“Yes,” agreed Odilo, misunderstanding, “you must get back to Gogo and your grandmother at Black Eagle.”
“Sorry, Odilo,” said Martine. “We can’t until we’ve found Khan. We have to try to save him from Mr. Rat’s hunters.”
Odilo couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “This is madness,” he protested. “Mr. Ratcliffe and his hunters, these are very dangerous men. This is something for the police. Please, children, you must get home to Gogo and your granny. Come, let me go with you.”
Martine’s chin was set with determination. “Tell my grandmother that I love her and can’t wait to see her. Tell her that I hope she understands why we can’t come back just yet. Right now we have a promise to keep.”
18
It was the witch doctor who told them they were too late. They came cantering out of the bush in a headlong rush and were confronted with a sight so surreal that it was too much even for Mambo. He slammed on the brakes and Ben sailed over his head, fortunately landing agilely on his feet. Sirocco reared and threatened to bolt, and Martine had to dismount in order to calm her. Then she and Ben stood transfixed by the bizarre, almost mystical scene before them.
Beneath a low, charcoal sky was a ring of ten vultures. With their hunched shoulders, gray crests, and shifty, all-knowing eyes, they resembled judges—spiteful, bad-tempered judges, going by the way they were hissing, cawing, and pecking at one another over something unseen. In the center of the circle, wearing his necklace of horns, belt of ostrich feathers, and leopard-skin kilt, was the witch doctor.
The Last Leopard Page 11
